Reinventing Research? Information Practices in the Humanities

[re-blogged from Resource Connection : April 26, 2011]

A project of the Research Information Network (RIN) focuses on the behaviours and needs of researchers working in  the humanities.The goal of RIN study is to:

• “develop an in-depth understanding of humanities researchers’ approaches to discovering, accessing, analysing, managing, creating, refining and disseminating information resources;
• “provide comparisons between the behaviours and needs of researchers in different subjects/disciplines, research teams or institutional contexts;
• “identify barriers to more effective performance in using, creating, managing and exchanging information resources, and suggest how they might be overcome.”

The report is based on interviews and focus groups with academics responsible for digital humanities projects such as Old Bailey Online, Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, and The Digital Republic of Letters, projects they’ve arrayed in a two dimensional attribute space defined by computational complexity and collaborative complexity:

 The report is available to download from Information use: case studies in the humanities – Report

Author: Dan Ryan

I'm currently an Academic Program Director at MinervaProject.com. I've been a professor at University of Toronto, University of Southern California, and Mills College teaching things like human centered design, computational thinking, modeling for policy sciences, and social theory. I'm driven by the desire to figure out how to teach twice as many twice as well twice as easily. View all posts by Dan Ryan