Unveiling the Veil: reflecting on the omission of workflows in Digital Humanities research projects and their implications for reproducibility
Creators: name: Oliveira, João Pedro
name: Gonçalves de Magalhães, Ana Filipa
name: Almeida, Contança
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: To what extent are workflows documented, accessible, and comprehensible? If achieving reproducibility is a structural objective, why are the definition, clarity, and explanatory fluidity of Digital Humanities project workflows not readily available or occasionally, inaccessible to the interested scientific community? How significantly will this issue impact the replicability of research project results? When analysing these issues and comparing it with research projects in the so-called ‘exact sciences’, it appears that the majority of research projects in Digital Humanities omit their workflows. This research delves into whether the current state of Digital Humanities projects conforms to the global objectives of Open Science, Open Data and FAIR principles. It examines whether there is any misalignment compromising reproducibility and replicability of the results.

Weiland (2018) defines workflows as a deliberate or rational organization of any purposeful activity, typically specifying its steps in the form of a process directed at a particular result. Therefore, to address our concerns about the omission of workflows in Digital Humanities research projects, we sought to discuss this definition through an in-depth qualitative analysis of some case studies.

To achieve this, we looked at three interdisciplinary projects ranging from contemporary performing arts to digital environmental history: “ERC Project: From Stage to Data, the Digital Turn of Contemporary Performing Arts Historiography (STAGE)”; “In Search of the Drowned in the Words: Testimonies and Testimonial Fragments of the Holocaust” and “The Making of a Forest: landscape change at the Argentine-Brazilian border, 1953-2017”.

Preliminary findings suggest that while digital humanities projects often articulate overarching principles of Open Science, FAIR principles, and general methodology the overall granularity of workflows required for enhancing reproducibility is often lacking. Decisions made at critical junctures of the research process, nuances in information manipulation, and the specific configurations of digital tools employed need to be enhanced. (Liu et al., 2017) This raises concerns regarding the reproducibility and replicability of the knowledge generated within the Digital Humanities domain as a direct consequence of the lack of workflow evidence.

We consider the need to deepen the disparity in the advancement of Open Science and similar principles amidst the underdeveloped state of workflows in Digital Humanities research projects. By implementing clearer workflows, the replicability of results would become evident and could be more readily integrated into various ongoing projects. The clarification of individual research decisions, information handling, and exploration sources throughout the project lifecycle lacks a comprehensive definition, posing challenges for e-science scholars in method development based on previously used methods in research projects (Antonijevic & Cahoy, 2018).

In this paper, we propose to reflect on the importance of making information about workflows accessible and comprehensible through documentation, giving concrete examples from the case studies analysed.