Experts Forum on Scholarly Activity Process Modeling

The Preparing DARIAH: The digital research infrastructure for the arts and humanities in Europe (www.dariah.eu) project is a major initiative in the field of cyber-scholarship in the European Union, the grand vision for which is to facilitate long-term preservation of and access to Arts and Humanities research information. A necessary step towards this goal is to develop appropriate object and process models for the planned digital humanities infrastructure in DARIAH. The Expert Forum forms part of DCU’s work within the conceptual workpackage of DARIAH (WP8), based on a combination of scholarly information behaviour literature survey with qualitative research on how arts and humanities researchers interact with information. It contributes to the development of a process model of scholarly information work, and also feed into the specification of an object model for information resources and scholarly objects pertinent to humanities research, an important factor in determining digital infrastructure requirements for scholarship.

As part of process scoping work in DARIAH, interview-based, qualitative research was conducted on humanities researchers’ actual information practices and opinions on digital information use. Its results concern questions regarding:

1. the actual kinds of information work performed by mainstream and digital humanities researchers, as part of particular research activities, and their implications on the specification of digital repositories, services and tools for arts and humanities research;
2. the relationship between research activities and particular kinds of information objects (including scholarly objects) for specific research fields; and,
3. the relative importance of particular “scholarly primitives” for arts and humanities research and the way they are, or could be, supported by specific digital research methods, procedures, services and tools.

Substantive research results were consolidated with findings from an extensive survey of prior studies on scholarly information behaviour in a conceptual model of scholarly information activity, which accounts for relationships between user requirements stemming from research information processes and relevant digital services and tools.

Therefore, as an essential step to develop a fuller understanding of conceptual issues and to validate substantive research findings the Digital Curation Unit is organizing an Expert’s Forum to be held on 10 and 11 June 2010 in Athens, involving a select group of leading researchers of scholarly information work and digital humanists. While it touches upon broader theoretical, methodological and technology issues, the forum will focus on receiving feedback, nurturing critical discussion and reaching consensus amongst participants on the empirical study and conceptual modeling work on scholarly information practices and requirements for scholarly e-infrastructure conducted by DCU as part of DARIAH. It will be structured in six two-hour sessions, each dealing with a particular question or set of questions relevant to the objectives of DARIAH process scoping (WP8.1) work, based on a combination of invited contributions and open discussion amongst participants.

Dates: Thursday, 10 June, Friday, 11 June 2010

Venue: To be confirmed

Contact person: Dr. Agiatis Benardou, Tel: 210 6990522 ext.: 112, Fax: 210 6990522

Email: experts.forum@dcu.gr