Dallas, Costis (2013) Scholarly Activity, Information Requirements and Research Infrastructures

Scholarly activity, information requirements and research infrastructures
European initiatives and intellectual foundations

An iSchool colloquium talk by Costis Dallas Faculty of Information University of Toronto
Costis Dallas (2013) Scholarly activity, information requirements and research infrastructures: European initiatives and intellectual foundations
Outline
European digital infrastructures for the humanities Presenting method and results of a recent study Questioning some widely accepted truisms: Should infrastructures mainly serve digital humanists? provide those services researchers ask for? offer access chiefly to primary data? mainly support information seeking? implement the humanities research worlflow? be like integrated Virtual Research Environments? Theorizing and modeling scholarly activity Conceptual dependencies and open issues
Digital infrastructure initiatives and user research
European humanities digital research infrastructures projects

Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Datasets Networking in Europe Europeana Cloud / Europeana Research Also Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure ..and HERA, Project BAMBOO, DASISH, HERA, CenterNet, arts-humanities.net
DARIAH-EU
Mission: to enhance and support digitally-enabled research across the humanities and arts DARIAH aims to develop and maintain an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices DARIAH is working with communities of practice to:
Explore and apply ICT-based methods and tools to enable new research questions to be asked and old questions to be posed in new ways Improve research opportunities and outcomes through linking distributed digital source materials of many kinds Exchange knowledge, expertise, methodologies and practices across domains and disciplines
Legal form: Established as an European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) Follow-up from Preparing DARIAH (2008-2011) project
Studying scholarly practice and needs in EU infrastructures projects

Semi-structured interviews in the Preparing DARIAH project (DCU, Greece) Mixed methods research in EHRI, based on concurrent:
Researcher questionnaire survey (N: 277; DCU, Greece) 15 semi-structured interviews with researchers (DCU, Greece) 20 semi-structured interviews with archivists (KCL, UK; NIOD, Netherlands)
Further research ARIADNE and eCloud starting now (February March 2013) DARIAH-EU planned research on Understanding scholarly practice (2013-2015) Methods ontology work in collaboration with NeDiMAH (initiated January 2013)
Information seeking, behaviour and use research on scholarly practice

Stone (1982) Humanities scholars: information needs and uses Tibbo (1991) Information systems and services for the humanities Beeman (1994) Stalking the art historian Dalton & Charnigo (2004) Historians and their information sources Duff et al. (2004) Historians use of archival sources Toms & OBrien (2008) Understanding the ICT needs of the ehumanist Palmer & Craigin (2008) Scholarship and disciplinary practices and many more: Jones (1989), Sievert & Sievert (1989), Gould (1998), Chu (1999), Yakel (2005), Case (2002/2006)
Studying humanists in the digital infrastructures specification context

Different questions to those in information behaviour research Instrumental rationale: to develop better system requirements for infrastructures Addressing affordances that may not yet exist
Approach and objectives

Specification of digital infrastructurse for the arts and humanities needs to address the historical practices, needs and perceptions of scholars Seeking to understand information requirements of scholarly research, as well as differences between disciplines, research fields and methodologies Evidence-based substantiation of infrastructure requirements and specifications
How scholars interact with the whole spectrum of information and conceptual entities, digital as well as non-digital
Developing a conceptual framework for the identification of pertinent categories and properties representing scholarly research
EHRI
How do Holocaust researchers familiar with digital technology account for their information needs, practices and technology use?
EHRI survey
Population
Online digital technology users involved in Holocaust-related research, regardless of professional status and affiliation Most appropriate target group for use of planned EHRI services
Data constitution
Online questionnaire, using the Surveymonkey service 277 total valid responses (less in some questions)
Sampling
Purposive sampling approach Recruitement of respondents through publicity to: Holocaust-related online forums and information services EHRI network of partners
Mixed methods methodological framework

Questionnaire survey running in parallel to semi-structured interviews, analyzed by means of qualitative content analysis and conceptual modeling Questionnaire formulation informed by preliminary interview results Survey results further interpreted through semi-structured interviews
Scope of survey
Demographics of research actors
Country of residence Status (researcher, student, amateur..) Discipline or field of research Experience in archival research
Procedures: beliefs and attitudes

On collaboration and sharing On resource trustworthiness
Place
Place of work Hardware devices used
Use of different kinds of resources

Unpublished resources Published sources
Digital tools and services

Software tools used Online services used
Reported importance of specific research activities

Information seeking Entry points to information Foreign language use Storing and organising Studying and annotating Collaborating
Motives
Reasons for using digital technology for research
Who are the Holocaust researchers?

NB: Purposive sample represents connected researchers
Most respondents live in Europe; US residents the 2nd largest group.

Most respondents live in Europe, while one out of seven (14%) lives in the United States. The largest groups are residents of Germany (20%) and Holland (15%). Next are residents of Israel and the UK (6%), Hungary (4%), Greece, France, Belgium and Romania (3%).
EHRI researchers questionnaire survey. C. Dallas, A. Benardou & P. Constantopoulos, Digital Curation Unit-IMIS, Athena Research Centre, Greece (2011-12).
More than are professional researchers; students and amateurs follow suit.
Researchers are the largest group: 28% working in universities, 13% outside academia and 13% are freelance. 20% are PhD or postgraduate students. Smaller groups include amateur researchers (7%) and museum professionals (5%).
2/3 are historians followed by Hebrew/Jewish studies, cultural studies, literature & political science.
Of 292 respondents, 187 identified history as one of their research fields, 45 said Hebrew/Jewish studies, 37 cultural studies, 28 languages and literature, 21 political science and 18 international relations. Museum studies, sociology, visual studies and archival science followed suit. Holocaust-related cultural representation, memory and trauma research may explain non-obvious frequency of cultural and museum studies.
Most respondents report being experienced in archival research.

Of 190 respondents to this question, 90 identify themselves as experts in conducting archival research, 85 as of intermediate expertise and only 15 as novices.
Use of resources
Textual resources still predominate; audio and video have gone digital.
The large majority of respondents report using textual resources in order of frequency, correspondence, official and legal documents - and photographs, compared to much smaller numbers for audiovisual media. Textual sources are notably more often accessed in analog form; conversely, video and sound recordings are more often accessed in digital form.
Books still most commonly used; print still more common than digital access.
Books are the most common kind of published sources used by respondents, closely followed by journals, conference proceedings and, not far behind, self-published and grey literature. Print is still more common than digital access, especially for books.
Digital access for journals predictably more common for academic faculty and students.
Research activities
Most important research activities for respondents
Multilingual primary resource use tops the list. Activities related to seeking unpublished sources, as well as in filing and organizing both unpublished and published materials are also often listed as very important: Footnote hunting, query searching, query refinement and consulting finding aids to find primary sources Storing digital copies, collecting references, and storing printed copies of both unpublished and published materials Activities related to study and annotation follow suit in being often considered very important: Highlighting relevant text passages, storing notes with them, looking for interesting passages and writing margin notes Asking for comments on initial research ideas follows as the most important collaboration activity
Named entities and dates the most important aspects of subject used to find unpublished sources.
In seeking primary sources by subject, the most common entry points considered as very important by respondents were, in order of frequency, person names, dates, places and names of specific events; classifications of events, of people and of places, and other topics, were less frequently mentioned as very important.
Name of issuing authority or author the most important document property used to find sources.
In seeking primary sources by document property, the most common entry points considered as very important by respondents were, in order of frequency, name of author or issuing authority, collection name, resource genre and format. Document properties were less frequently reported as very important than aspects of resource subject such as named entities and dates.
Attitudes
Research of other people is an important interest; about would share resources and publish jointly
About two thirds would like to find out about others current research work. Almost as many: Would share interesting resources and information on their own work Would like to publish together with others Fewer regard copyright or privacy as major obstacles.
Some consider print publications more trustworthy, and physical archive resources more so than digital.
A sizeable minority consider printed papers and books more trustworthy than online publications, and resources in a physical archives more trustworthy than those in a digital archive.
Place of work
More respondents work at home than in a library, an archive or in a shared or private office.
The majority of respondents work regularly at home. Many work in a library, and a slightly lower number in an archive. Fewer still work in a personal or shared office.
Four times as many people use their own PC vs. a shared one; a sizeable minority uses digital tables or mobiles.
Most respondents use their own computer for research purposes. A much smaller, but still sizeable proportion, use a digital tablet, or a shared/work computer. These results, suggesting mobility and independence, fit well with the information that respondents work more often at home, and also frequently at other places such as a library or archive.
Use of digital tools and services
Excel is the Swiss army knife for research data; a small minority use user-configured Access DBs.
The most common software applications used are word processors and spreadsheets. A bibliographic reference management software, as well as various database applications follow suit. Only a few use institutional or thematic research repositories.
Google dominates online services use; filesharing and social network services are also used by some.
Google+ - probably meant as Google in general tops the list of online services used, followed by Google Documents and Translate. Decreasing numbers mention that they use Dropbox, various social networks such as Facebook, academia.edu and LinkedIn, and Twitter. Zotero and Refworks are also used, albeit by a small minority.
Motives for ICT use
Majority uses computers for diverse research uses, including annotation & research data management.
The majority of respondents use computers for most aspects of the research lifecycle: word processing, searching catalogues and finding digital resources, communicating with colleagues, searching digital journals, keeping notes, organizing research data, preparing presentations, and storing relevant publications locally.
Theorizing scholarly practice
J. Unsworths scholarly primitives

On humanities research process modeling: a core list of primitives
Discovering Annotating Comparing Referring Sampling Illustrating Representing
Providing for information access, manipulation and display environments with appropriate affordances and user interfaces Facilitating digital scholarship through new kinds of representation and analysis of arts and humanities information
Modeling scholarly practice

A formal model, intended to capture knowledge about scholarly information practices A specialisation of CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model Inspired by activity theory
Scholarly Research Activity Model
Cultural-historical activity theory

Activity: purposeful interaction of a subject with the world Directed toward an object, a physical or conceptual entity embodying the fulfilment of some objective or motive, intended to meet a specific need of the subject Activity systems are composed as a hierarchy of activities, constituted by conscious actions, which in turn are constituted by sub-conscious operations Subjects can be individuals, but also communities of practice, sharing needs and motives. Activities take place by means of tool mediation, which include both physical and cognitive mediational artefacts
The compositional structure of activity
A simple(r) activity theory model
Descriptive vs. normative aspects of scholarly activity
Scholarly information activity as digital curation at the source
Questions
What is the scope of information objects curated in the scholarly research process?
What is the relation between data and scholarly objects?
What is the structure of scholarly research activity, and what does it entail?
How do workflows look like, and how fixed are they? How serialised, and how granular, are scholarly primitives?
What is the relationship between information seeking and curation, as part of scholarly activity?
When is curation enacted in the scholarly activity lifecycle, and by whom?
Co-reference, merging object identity

Quite frequently a scholar might find a fragment of a sculpture or vase in one museum that joins to a similar piece in another museum. Dyfri Williams has done just that with an Archaic Greek vase fragment, in the Ure Museum [], that joins a dinos (bowl) attributed to the painter, Sophilos, which is housed in the British Museum []. So access to the fragment on the Ure DB gives visitors only a glimpse of the whole, and to see the more significant parts of the vase, one has to have access to the corresponding piece in the British Museum (Fuchs, Isaksen & Smith, 2005)
Object collocation, attribution

[] The same Archaic fragment is also part of several distributed assemblages of objects. For example, someone interested in the works of Sophilos would wish to consult all of the 91 works attributed to or signed by that artist [...] These are fortunately brought together, albeit in limited form, on the Beazley Archive. (Fuchs, Isaksen & Smith, 2005)
Note organising, sorting

Are the notes from Evernote printable one on a 5 by 7 notecard that I could then spread out on the floor? (a whiteboard with magnets, what an idea, hadn't thought of that-- I have a fear of magnets since they used to destroy things on disks and I was always afraid of losing all my work due to an errant magnet.) I've fantasized about getting a bunch of these mounted on the wall somehow. Usually I spread out my notecards on the floor. (Anon. 2010, chroniclecareers.com forum)
Versioning, curating
Okay, you get someone annotating or correcting or sending information. You can get it as a list of emails, and then you have to work with that, and then you need the management tool for that. You need to know, okay, this one must be sent to this advisor ... This one is something that I can ignore. This one needs another consultation with this expert. This one I want to take into account and changethe authorised description. So this kind of administrative tool does not exist, we [havent found] yet a good tool for that anywhere. (Speck & Links 2013: archivist interview)
Searching, organising
I want to be able to search through all notecards I have ever made ever in my life, not just those for a certain text I've read since that would limit my quotes to that text. I want every quote I've ever jotted down that contains the word "umbrage" to appear if I search for that term. [] I want to then have a space where I can take the results of multiple such searches:
Victorian Honor Umbrage
and order the notecards or quotes in a way I want. (anon. 2010, chroniclecareers.com forum)
Term selection, construction, definition

As far as possible I use established terms as clearly as I can. I would rather try to describe what Im looking at and see how it sits within the framework of discussion in the literature. I think if you have to call a new term you could have to be really sure what you are doing. [] Where one does have to create a new term it needs to be glossed with the kind of definition that you hope will then get into the secondary literature in its own right (UK archaeologist, quoted in Benardou et al. 2010)
Scholarly primitives as research activitycentred relations
Relationship between activities and information objects
Interplay between facts and theories

[i]t is conceivable that, through the use of links, web site visitors may be able to see how the archaeologist moves back and forth [] between images, artifacts, documents, and theories, to arrive at an interpretation about the site. They may be able to better understand which of the archaeologist's questions were NOT answered what "test implications" were NOT met. Suppose visitors could "see", with image maps, say, the artifacts as they lay in the ground and experience links between those artifacts and the ethnographic examples that suggested certain kinds of artifact patterning to the archaeologist? (Landow 1992)
From objects to theories

categorical knowledge, domain knowledge, theories, classifications, ontologies
identifications, descriptions, facts
<tag1> <tag2> <tag3> </tag1>
things in the world

56
Epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina 1999)

Particular configurations of
Working practices Institutional arrangements Roles and hierarchies Technologies
They differ amongst different communities of epistemic practice

E.g., between high-energy physicists and molecular biologists Not only diffferent disciplines!
Tool mediation
Archaeologists need to be more aware not only of how we span the multiple gaps, the multiple fields, between the material world and text, plans, maps, illustrations and so on, but also of how these processes are caught up in diverse networks linking fields which encompass everything from funding bodies, sociopolitical alliances, media and materialities [] to, for example, even the modes of engagement and articulation practised by an artillery officer in the British military during the Napoleonic wars. We need [] to situate this process in relation to these larger networks []. Things (our tapes, trowels, theodolites, media, etc.), too, have a stake in our nonlinear and interconnected paths of knowledge production []. They too must be included. This scheme of multiple fields is a means of maintaining something of the complexity of archaeological practice in our modes of documentation and language. (Witmore 2004)
Tool mediation: a broader account

A continuum of epistemic objects, mediated by
Thick descriptions, materiality-informed inscriptions Importance of secondary archive
Complex subject access

Overlapping and inconsistent terminologies Different languages, disciplinary traditions
Persistence of value of old knowledge

Static or slow-changing information resources, e.g. corpora Legacy research always important
Object-centered research mediation

Epistemic cultures in object-centred disciplines
Information-intensive, object-centred E.g., molecular biology, archaeology, art history Typically idiographic rather than nomothetic Densely connected, deeply nested, topologically complex objects Inconsistency of facts, intransitivity in reasoning
Practice informed by thingy mediating tools

Quasi-objects, boundary objects, mutable mobiles Material tools, interactive kinds People in situated action
How an archaeological site remembers its facts
The world of activity

Activity model
Epistemic agency Epistemic process Epistemic object
A second-level articulation between an ontology, an epistemology and a methodology
Scholarly activity meta-domains

Epistemic agency
Scholarly activity
Epistemic process
Epistemology
Epistemic objects
Questions and issues
Infrastructure requirements
Individual disciplines (will) have their own mechanisms, repositories, tools and other resources In this light, where are particular needs for cross-discipline resources, services, tools, infrastructures? Which of the following is a) desirable, b) feasible?
Do nothing is should be an issue for each discipline to solve Focus just on cross-discipline information dissemination, so that people can know and adopt tools and services used succesfully in neighbouring disciplines Identify those collections/resources/datasets used across specific disciplines, and provide cross-discipline access Federate and provide collective access to all discipline-based information sources (collection-level, people, methods etc.) Federate and provide full access to individual resources across the humanities
Requirements information access and discovery

Do we need information services on
Research problems, programmes, long-term initiatives? Topics, research areas, concepts, theories as entry points? People, i.e., scholars, researchers? E.g., a registry or community of practice where humanists can find out what others are working on; who works on a particular area, etc? Collections of research sources, existing databases, repositories, archive? E.g., a collection level registry? Should it include just digital or all collections? Research methods, procedures, best practices? E.g., an systematic index of methods related to disciplines and research problems? Also with particular projects / people / collections involved? Tools and services? Listing what tools are available, and for which purpose?
Requirements curation
Primary cultural object repositories, corpora, databases etc. exist in different countries, disciplines, research areas, and rightly so, ensuring reliability and authenticity Given the nature of humanities information objects, and the rise of online research, how do we keep up to date information on corrections, annotations, links as knowledge on these objects evolves? Given that scholarly research is evidenced in publication increasingly digital, especially for journals- is it useful to connect these to resources, and how? How do we imagine online scholarly communication? Apart from digital publication, is interaction in blogs, forums etc. important? Should it become part of the information record of research? How should it be preserved and supported?
Requirements - sociotechnical
Should infrastructure projects (such as DARIAH) focus mostly on developing their own systems, or not? Which of the following are a) desirable, b) feasible?
Develop prescriptive mechanisms for particular areas of scholarly information, e.g. for scholarly resource metadata and work towards enforcement across Europe Develop tools; a workbench; a virtual research environment Develop / evangelise standards, guidelines etc. to mine connect, integrate existing resources, tools etc. Develop canonical meta-collections, filters, recommenders Energise particular business models, trial initiatives etc. in the area of scholarly communication, publication, open access, academic advancement etc. Advocate adoption of digital humanities, provide information, learning materials etc.
Six truisms on the specification of humanities digital infrastructures
Truism #1: Digital infrastructures should serve digital humanists
Truism #2: Digital infrastructures should be based on digital services humanists ask for
Truism #3: Digital infrastructures should provide access to primary research data
Truism #4: Digital infrastructures should focus on serving information seeking needs
Truism #5: Digital infrastructures should support the humanities research workflow
Truism #6: digital infrastructures should provide an integrated virtual research environment for humanists
Thank you!
For more info: http://www.dariah.eu http://www.ehri-project.eu Costis.Dallas@utoronto.ca

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Scholarly activity, information requirements and research infrastructures

European initiatives and intellectual foundations

Digital infrastructure initiatives and user research

European humanities digital research infrastructures projects

Studying scholarly practice and needs in EU infrastructures projects

Information seeking, behaviour and use research on scholarly practice

Studying humanists in the digital infrastructures specification context

Approach and objectives

Mixed methods methodological framework

Procedures: beliefs and attitudes

Use of different kinds of resources

Digital tools and services

Reported importance of specific research activities

Who are the Holocaust researchers?

Most respondents live in Europe; US residents the 2nd largest group.

Most respondents report being experienced in archival research.

Most important research activities for respondents

Use of digital tools and services

Motives for ICT use

Theorizing scholarly practice

J. Unsworths scholarly primitives

Modeling scholarly practice

Scholarly Research Activity Model

Cultural-historical activity theory

The compositional structure of activity

A simple(r) activity theory model

Descriptive vs. normative aspects of scholarly activity

Scholarly information activity as digital curation at the source

Co-reference, merging object identity

Object collocation, attribution

Note organising, sorting

Term selection, construction, definition

Scholarly primitives as research activitycentred relations

Relationship between activities and information objects

Interplay between facts and theories

From objects to theories

identifications, descriptions, facts

<tag1> <tag2> <tag3> </tag1>

things in the world

Epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina 1999)

They differ amongst different communities of epistemic practice

Tool mediation: a broader account

Complex subject access

Persistence of value of old knowledge

Object-centered research mediation

Practice informed by thingy mediating tools

How an archaeological site remembers its facts

The world of activity

A second-level articulation between an ontology, an epistemology and a methodology

Scholarly activity meta-domains

Questions and issues

Requirements information access and discovery

Six truisms on the specification of humanities digital infrastructures

Truism #1: Digital infrastructures should serve digital humanists

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