Natasa Bulatovic

The CENDARI Infrastructure

The CENDARI infrastructure is a research-supporting platform designed to provide tools for transnational historical research, focusing on two topics: medieval culture and World War I. It exposes to the end users modern Web-based tools relying on a sophisticated infrastructure to collect, enrich, annotate, and search through large document corpora. Supporting researchers in their daily work is a novel concern for infrastructures. We describe how we gathered requirements through multiple methods to understand historians’ needs and derive an abstract workflow to support them. We then outline the tools that we have built, tying their technical descriptions to the user requirements. The main tools are the note-taking environment and its faceted search capabilities; the data integration platform including the Data API, supporting semantic enrichment through entity recognition; and the environment supporting the software development processes throughout the project to keep both technical partners and researchers in the loop. The outcomes are technical together with new resources developed and gathered, and the research workflow that has been described and documented.

User-centered design practices in digital humanities : experiences from DARIAH and CENDARI

Abstract User experience and usability (UX) form a key part of research and best practice for product and software development. In this paper, the topic is addressed from the perspective of the Digital Humanities (DH) and approaches undertaken in two DH infrastructure projects, DARIAH and CENDARI are presented. Both projects addressed aspects of UX, focusing on the usage of a single software tool, as well as on an integrated research workflow using several tools and devices. The article lists the main factors, gleaned from research undertaken in the projects, that influence usability practices in the DH, and provides possible recommendations on how to approach them.

Usability in Digital Humanities - Evaluating user interfaces, infrastructural components and the use of mobile devices during research process

The usability of tools and services that form a digital research infrastructure is a key asset for their acceptance among researchers. When applied to infrastructures, the concept of usability needs to be extended to other aspects such as the interoperability between several infrastructure components. In this paper, we present the results of several usability studies. Our aim was not only to test the usability of single tools but also to assess the extent to which different tools and devices can be seamlessly integrated into a single digital research workflow. Our findings suggest that more resources need be spent on testing of digital tools and infrastructure components and that it is especially important to conduct user tests covering the whole knowledge process.