Part of panel presentation with Kathryn Eccles, Eric Meyer, Lucy Power, and Ralph Schroeder for iCS-OII 2011 September 2011, Oxford

1. Practices, Challenges, &
Directions in Digital
Humanities Scholarship
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Monica Bulger and Eric Meyer,
Oxford Internet Institute
iCS-OII 2011 Symposium
September 23, 2011

2. Are new technologies transforming
information practices among humanities
researchers?

3. Research
• 6 case studies, 54 participants
• Interview, survey, focus groups
• Questions about daily practice,
dissemination, collaboration, changes in use,
barriers, ability to ask and answer new
questions, wishlist for information resources

4. Case studies (54 participants)

5. Use practices
-> 62% use keyword search in library
databases
-> 55% browse library materials
online
-> 59% browse library materials in
person

6. Use practices
-> 76% browse online journals (48%
browse print versions)

7. Starting point
->79% start with Google
-> 95% learn from peers or experts
-> 83% use citation chaining

8. Transformations
Changes in practice?

9. “ The amount of time I now spend doing the
very mechanical, laborious, time-
consuming work is much smaller. You can
now do things in 5 seconds which it took
you 3 months to do a few years ago.

10. “ 20 years ago, I would have gone into the
British Library and done it with the actual
paper in front of me. Now I sit at home
and I do a keyword search.

11. “ It’s a huge change. You can do things
much more quickly, read much more
widely, find connections…it’s very, very
important.

12. “ Old Bailey Online hasn’t replaced
anything for me or displaced anything for
me, but it is part of this general
transformation of how I do what I do.

13. Asking new questions?

14. “ The text search, for example on 18th
Century Books Online is phenomenal and
something you can’t do when you actually
go into the archive.

15. “
I could always have got it. But it would
have been, in some cases very difficult—
and very slow. So, I have more access to
more information. It’s not like there’s
more to be got hold of, there are more
ways of getting hold of them, and they’re
better ways.

16. “
I’m not sure all of this raises the quality of
anybody’s work. I think it would be quite
daft to pretend that all of this makes us
better scholars, or makes our books or
papers of higher quality. I don’t know if
that is true by any means, but it certainly
makes it easier and I suppose makes the
quantity of stuff that you can produce
greater.

17. “
It’s functionally easier, but there’s a
distinction between searching and
thinking. So, searching is easier, thinking
is just the same.

18. “
The computer can help me, but it can’t
replace me in understanding.

19. “ My greatest frustration in life is that we
can now answer all the questions we had
in 1980 faster, much, much faster. And we
can get around to publishing them much,
much more quickly. But what we haven’t
yet done is develop the new questions and
the new paradigms that should be
possible, and that we as imaginative
scholars should be able to imagine.

20. Recommendations & future
directions

21. “ Break down boundaries between
text, artifact, and image.

22. ->Reliable & sustainable structures
->Citation consistency for online
resources
->Reward systems for development of
digital archives, online portals, digital
publications

23. Thank you to our
Humanities Information
Practices project partners:
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24. TITLE