Agiatis Benardou

Understanding the Information Requirements of Arts and Humanities Scholarship

This paper reports on research of scholarly research practices and requirements conducted in the context of the Preparing DARIAH European e-Infrastructures project, with a view to ensuring current and future fitness for purpose of the planned digital infrastructure, services and tools. It summarises the findings of earlier research, primarily from the field of human information behaviour as applied in scholarly work, it presents a conceptual perspective informed by cultural-historical activity theory, it introduces briefly a formal conceptual model for scholarly research activity compliant with CIDOC CRM, it describes the plan of work and methodology of an empirical research project based on open-questionnaire interviews with arts and humanities researchers, and presents illustrative examples of segmentation, tagging and initial conceptual analysis of the empirical evidence. Finally, it presents plans for future work, consisting, firstly, of a comprehensive re-analysis of interview segments within the framework of the scholarly research activity model, and, secondly, of the integration of this analysis with the extended digital curation process model we presented in earlier work.

From Europeana Cloud to Europeana Research: The Challenges of a Community-Driven Platform Exploiting Europeana Content

This paper presents Europeana Cloud, a Best Practice Network coordinated by the Europeana Foundation, which aims at setting the foundations and building Europeana Research, a platform allowing third parties to develop tools and services based on Europeana content. Through a collaborative, user-centred and a mixed methods approach, we have tried to identify the needs of researchers in the fields of the Humanities and the Social Sciences, while attempting to actively engage various sub-disciplines in the course of our work.

Defining user requirements for holocaust research infrastructures and services in the EHRI project

The poster presents the background, conceptual framework, methodology and initial results of a mixed research project, investigating information practice and user requirements of historians, humanities scholars and social scientists working on the Holocaust. The results of the study will be a foundation for the specification of functionalities of the European digital infrastructure planned as part of the EU-funded European Holocaust Research Infrastructure project, and consisting of the EHRI search/portal and the EHRI Virtual Research Environment. Particular issues to be dealt with are the summarization of qualitative evidence from semi-open interviews by means of a conceptualization of relevant descriptive codes of research activities, resource types and tools/services; identification of specific user requirements and of different researcher profiles through statistical analysis of an online questionnaire defined on the basis of initial qualitative research; and, identification and theorization of special needs of Holocaust research, seen as a highly multi- and inter-disciplinary field of inquiry.

Cultural Heritage Infrastructures in Digital Humanities

What are the leading tools and archives in digital cultural heritage? How can they be integrated into research infrastructures to better serve their intended audiences? In this book, authors from a wide range of countries, representing some of the best research projects in digital humanities related to cultural heritage, discuss their latest findings, both in terms of new tools and archives, and how they are used (or not used) by both specialists and by the general public.