Digital Infrastructure for Art Historical Research: thinking about user needs

Abstract

During the past years, the large technological advancements have provided research communities with applications and services never considered before. However, as the increased implication of the new technologies in the Arts & Humanities have greatly affected the scholarly research process, the necessity to adapt digital tools and services to the needs of specific groups of researchers has considerably grown. The present paper aims to focus on the informational and methodological behaviour of art historians, so as to identify possible requirements for providing them with functional digital infrastructure. Hence, their research profile, their needs in terms of resources and the methodologies they employ should be examined. The emphasis, in particular, should be given in research activities with great value for art historical research, such as the information seeking and the collection of the required information objects. By supporting these first, stages of research with digital tools and services tailored to the needs of researchers would, actually, facilitate the whole research process in the field. Finally, this paper reports on research conducted for the author's current PhD Thesis "Personal Research Collections: examining research practices and user needs in art historical research", under the supervision of Prof. Claire Warwick and Mr Simon Mahony.

Digital 3D Technologies for Humanities Research and Education: An Overview

“…Regarding research scenarios and practices in architectural history research, investigation of digital research and information tasks is currently often based on the "mechanistic" idea of research action as a sequence of steps (e.g., research primitives as a sequence of research operations like literature search, writing, comparing [120,383] or eScience [384]). While this paradigm enables granular systematization, even for visual research (e.g., [385,386]), it rarely reflects the specifics of humanities research and their highly individual and tacit procedures.…”

The Researcher as Curator in the Digital Age: Personal Collections and User Needs in Art History

“…Yet, despite the aforementioned barriers, scholars in art history seem to more or less engage with new technologies at some stage of their research (Kamposiori, 2012). Moreover, as digitisation initiatives increase, it is anticipated for the use of digital resources and services to grow dramatically in the nearest future.…”

“…In the field of art history, the building of personal collections is a habitual activity and it regards a variety of resources scholars manage to gather throughout their research career (Challener, 1999;Elam, 2007;Beaudoin & Brady, 2011;Kamposiori, 2012). Yet, because of the large analogue collections scholars achieve to create over the years, they are many times reluctant to move forward and use resources in digital format (Beaudoin & Brady, 2011); moreover, many scholars maintain analogue collections along with the digital ones due to fear of data loss in the digital environment (Palmer et al, 2009).…”