Purpose, completeness, and evidential source: Typological signposts in the collections landscape

Abstract

The diversification of digital scholarship poses significant challenges to integrating non‐traditional products of humanities scholarship—ranging from digital editions and linked data aggregations to software and virtual environments—into established ecosystems for sustaining and preserving scholarly communication. Without a strong understanding of the variety of forms of digital scholarship, it is difficult to establish broadly useful or systematic (and therefore sustainable) approaches to managing diverse digital products throughout their lifecycles. This study illuminates one region of the landscape of digital humanities scholarship by identifying and characterizing different types of scholar‐generated digital collections which make different contributions to scholarship. Through formal typological analysis of approximately 200 scholar‐generated digital humanities research collections, this study offers conceptual handles for understanding the principal purposes and contributions of digital collections, and the implications for evaluation, sustainment, and preservation of digital scholarship.