Transforming Scholarly Practice: Embedding Technological Interventions to Support the Collaborative Analysis of Ancient Texts

Abstract

e-Research and Cyberinfrastructure programmes actively promote the development of new forms of scientific practice and collaboration through the implementation of tools and technologies that support distributed collaborative work across geographically dispersed research institutes and laboratories. Whilst originating in scientific domains, we have more recently seen a turn to the design of systems that support research practices in the social sciences and the arts and humanities. Attempts to embed large-scale infrastructures into research settings has brought to the fore the necessity of understanding the knowledge, skills and practices of researchers within a variety of disciplines that might use these technologies. In this paper, we consider an approach to gathering requirements through the introduction of various technical interventions for relatively short term periods so that we may come to an understanding their impact on routine work practices. Drawing upon an analysis of the detailed ways in which classicists work with digital images, we discuss the requirements for systems that support them as they collaborate in the interpretation of particular types of images. We discuss implications for the development of infrastructures to support research collaboration in this area and conclude with reflections upon the experiences gained from conducting naturalistic studies in parallel with design interventions.

Sociotechnical Studies of Cyberinfrastructure and e-Research: Current Themes and Future Trajectories

“…The method of tracing the adoption and use of a new technological artifact, as a way to explore new sociotechnical arrangements (de la Flor et al 2010, this issue) will continue to be useful in CI just as it has long been for CSCW. In this issue, Monteiro's paper (2010, this issue) shows how an ethnographic study can give lie to the notion that digitization results in a disembodied practice divorced from the natural world.…”

Historical ontology and infrastructure

“…Scholars of infrastructure have studied the long-term of such organizations as a matter of changing technology [4], data [5], scale [6], practice [7], organization [8], rhythms of collaboration [9] or funding structures [10]. Such changes present challenges to infrastructure, which ultimately seeks to be a persistent set of resources that can also support the ongoing daily activities of heterogeneous actors [11].…”

Digital Images of Medieval Music Documents: Transforming Research Processes and Knowledge Production in Musicology

“…In previous papers [7,8,9,15] we have drawn upon detailed analyses of technological interventions to discuss requirements for designing virtual research environments so that scholars from different disciplines may produce collaborative interpretations. In particular, we find emerging themes across case studies where common features and functionality could be useful.…”

“…These include taking into account support for global collaboration using online workspaces. We suggest that an approach we term 'thin slice deep cut' [9] may be used to address this challenge where relatively short-term periods of data collection are conducted, often relying upon gathering small fragments of key substantive research activities which are then subject to detailed analysis. Such activities could run parallel to prototype development so that incremental iterations of a system may be evaluated by the researchers who would use them using quasi-naturalistic experiments.…”

“…We take this programme of work as our starting point in our investigations into how e-Research technologies are transforming research practices in the humanities [8] and the physical sciences [9] and find common themes emerging around both increased collaboration and speed of research outputs. Here, we discuss a particular area in the humanities -medieval musicology where research practices are in transition due to the increasing digitization and availability of the documents, written on parchment and paper, music was written on at that time.…”