A Blueprint for Digital Work Practices in the Humanities
Creators: name: Constantopoulos, Panos
name: Dritsou, Vicky
name: Gkirtzou, Katerina
name: Goulis, Helen
name: Kalafata, Patritsia
name: Sougioultzoglou, Irakleitos
name: Tzedopoulos, Yorgos
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: We present a blueprint for representing digital work practices in the Humanities, capable of accommodating domain-specific variations while fostering conformance with standards, metadata schemas and good practice guides. Its purpose is to help digital humanities researchers learn, adapt, apply and critically assess digital work practices, not only in isolated tasks, but in entire workflows. Understanding situation- and domain- specific workflows as specializations of more general processes can enhance effectiveness by virtue of normalization. It is then easier to reuse tools, information structures and vocabularies, to apply standards, to adhere to FAIR data principles [1] and data openness.

The blueprint was defined in the framework of the Greek project “The emerging landscape of digital work practices in the Humanities in the context of the European projects DARIAH and CLARIN” [2]. It was informed by an extensive survey of work practices, comprising a widely answered questionnaire [3] and six focus groups, and a critical review of relevant metadata schemas, conducted as part of the project in 2023. Relevant, among others, also are research requirements [4] recently reported by Europeana, previous analyses of work practices in the Humanities [5,6], and the findings of a pan-European survey conducted in DARIAH [7].

The blueprint features a structural and a procedural part. The structural part has the form of a knowledge graph, based on the Scholarly Ontology (SO) [8] and implemented using an opensource graph database system [9]. The SO provides a domain-neutral ontological model of research work. Specialized classes and domain-specific terminological resources are then employed to capture the work practices and support the requirements of different disciplines. In this way, processes, tools and information resources are contextualized in a manner allowing comparability and interoperability. In the work reported here, practices recorded in the survey have been represented in the knowledge base. Special effort was devoted to enriching the hierarchy of SO Activity Types to capture the scope of specific data seeking, production, organization and dissemination practices. A critical effectiveness factor is the alignment of metadata schemas and terminology with research practices. In our work we have identified metadata schemas appropriate to the domains and tasks recorded in the survey and mapped them to the relevant blueprint elements along with suggestions reflecting current best practice.

The procedural part has the form of a workflow generator, i.e., a generic workflow of research work, in particular the information processes involved. Formulated as a BMPN-style diagram, it represents an archetypical overall process specified in terms of high-level SO activity classes. Through a specialization parallel to that performed in the structural part, contextualized workflows are generated to represent the flow of work in specific domains and tasks. The workflow has evolved from that in [10]. For validation, it has been used to generate specific workflows corresponding to practices identified in the abovementioned survey, in addition to previously having generated the workflow of unifying historical archives [10]. The generic workflow is shown in the Figure below. For illustration purposes, it also includes certain subordinate activity types, quite widely used.

References

[1] Wilkinson, M., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I. et al. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci Data 3, 160018 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18

[2] Digital Landscape project, https://digital-landscape.gr/

[3] Maria Ilvanidou, Vicky Dritsou, Maria Gavriilidou, Kanella Pouli, Yorgos Tzedopoulos, Irakleitos Souyioultzoglou. The “Digital Landscape in Greece” Web Survey. In Book of Abstracts, DARIAH Annual Event 2023: Cultural Heritage Data as Humanities Research Data?, p. 54. Budapest, June 2023.

[4] Research Requirements. A survey on the reuse of digital cultural heritage, Report edited by the Europeana Foundation, August 2021, v1. https://pro.europeana.eu/project/research-requirements

[5] Agiatis Benardou, Panos Constantopoulos, Costis Dallas, “An approach to analyzing working practices of research communities in the humanities”, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing , 7, 105-127, 2013

[6] Hughes, L., Constantopoulos, P. and Dallas, C. (2016) Digital Methods in the Humanities: Understanding and Describing their Use across the Disciplines. In Schreibman, S., Siemens, R., Unsworth J. (Eds) A New Companion to Digital Humanities, Wiley-Blackwell.

[7] Dallas, C. and Chatzidiakou, N. (Eds). (2022). European survey on scholarly practices and digital needs in the human sciences. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6583037

[8] Pertsas, V., Constantopoulos, P. Scholarly Ontology: modelling scholarly practices. Int J Digit Libr 18, 173–190 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-016-0169-3

[9] Neo4j Graph Database. https://neo4j.com/product/neo4j-graph-database/

[10] Constantopoulos P., Dritsou V., Ilvanidou M., Chroni A. Aggregation and Curation of Historical Archive Information. In: Karagiannis D., Lee M., Hinkelmann K., Utz W. (eds) Domain-Specific Conceptual Modeling. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93547-4_23, 2022