An Information Behavior Study of Digital Humanities Research Projects' Participants

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The impact of digital technology has greatly expanded over the years, not just in sciences and engineering but also in social sciences and humanities. Humanities has been traditionally considered less involved in the digital technologies, yet with all kinds of digitalized archive, image collections and tools, new methodologies have also emerged among humanities scholars and their collaborators in computer sciences. These changes also reflected new ways of thinking about culture and knowledge, which in turn led to the emergence of digital humanities in 2000 and it became a new research area. However, with the continued evolution in the digital humanities, Library and Information Science (LIS) community has also actively sought how to effectively collaborate with the digital humanities scholar in order to provide new facilities and services. The study of humanities scholars’ behavior in using digital tools and methods has therefore emerged as an important issue in LIS. In recent years, the study of how humanists use text analysis, domain analysis and digital resources become a main issue in the field of digital humanities research, yet little attention has been paid to the information behaviors of the digital humanities research projects’ participants. Therefore, this study set out to investigate the work roles and the tasks of the humanities projects’ participants, how these work roles and tasks drive digital humanities scholars to seek information, how they select and use resources, and what role the information agencies such as libraries, archives or museums can play in providing their expertise, as well as how they might interact with cross-disciplinary experts. Of particular interest are how they attempt to overcome the barriers in obtaining the resources needed. To answer these question, it is important to their analyze resource preferences and resource usage characteristics. The study can be taken as a reference for digital library construction or design resource services, and it would shed light on the future development direction of Taiwan''s digital humanities, especially in the interdisciplinary endeavor of creating new resources. The literature review of this research firstly focused on the information behavior of digital humanities scholars, the information behavior model with work roles and tasks, other related literatures in the domain of digital humanities and digital libraries. Finally the eight information behavior dimensions of the digital humanities scholars in the work context were extracted and organized based on the synthesis of these existing model. These dimensions and related concepts are the basis of this empirical research. The digital humanities projects during the last five years from the Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures (ASCDC) website were chosen as the research field. The project director or core members of these projects were selected as the research interviewees. Members of libraries, archives, museums and other information agencies who had supported the research interviewees in the use of digital technology and resources, were also interviewed. This study mainly adopts two kinds of qualitative approach, including in-depth interviewing and Sonnenwald''s information horizon to collect data. Then, Huvlia’s analytic information horizon map is applied to draw the information horizon map of digital humanities’ scholar. Finally, a theoretical framework for explaining the information behavior of digital humanities’ scholar in the work context is proposed which is based on the research results. The results of this study can be broadly divided into the following three aspects: 1) to identify the reasons for the digital humanities scholar to participate digital humanities’ projects, including "work requirement", "research interest", "invited participation" and "mission sense". 2) to explore the impacts on their work tasks through participating in the project, including "promoting digital humanities related studies", "expanding individual research insight", "education promotion and value-added applications", "cultivating talents" and "developing digital humanities tools or platforms", participating scholars generally give a positive affirmation toward their projects and consider them as useful and important, although squeeze personal research time. 3) to discover the digital humanities’ scholars’ information behavioral characteristics. It includes the following dimensions: work contexts, work roles and tasks, resource need characteristics, information awareness and information behaviors, and analytic information horizon map. Firstly, the dimension of work contexts covers two scenarios: those involved with taking part in the projects and routine research work. Only a few people have a clear distinction between these two scenarios, both contexts intertwined with each other. The project attributes were rich and diverse, and the project members presented the diversity of cross-disciplinary research. It was found that it was necessary for participating members to enhance mutual understanding through long-term dialogue or with the assistance of cross-disciplinary talents, through formal or informal communication during the execution of the project. Next, the dimension of roles and tasks: the role and the task for routine research are to complete research papers; there are three types of work roles played during the execution of the project, including content providers, advocates and consultants. The task of content provider offered content construction, technology research and development, sustainable maintenance; the task of the advocate provided education or guidance, and promotion; the task of the consultant focused on translation, interpretation and contact. The work roles and tasks of the project are different from the goals or development directions of the application plan. Furthermore, the dimension of resource characteristics: it includes "personal characteristics" and "resource preferences", which are two major factors to see if there is an awareness of the source of information, the knowledge and the ability to acquire resources, and the success of information seeking. After that, the dimension of awareness and information behaviors: Information awareness is focused on "perceived environmental change or lack of knowledge" and "information source with knowledge". Unable to obtain resources is mainly due to material collection gaps and authorization issues. The information behaviors of digital humanities’ scholar included exploration, searching, browsing, filtering, using, communicating, reflecting, evaluating, monitoring and sharing. Lastly, the dimension of analytic information horizon map: this study analyzed and summarized the information horizon map according to the project role and tasks, and produces five kinds of information horizon maps: "content provider - content build", “content provider - technology R&D”, “content provider - sustainable maintenance”, ”consultant – translation”, “consultant – interpretation”, and only "content provider - sustainable maintenance" uses digital technology as resource entry point, the others use social networks instead. The main type of resources used was social networks, where experts in cross-disciplinary fields could be reached. According to the research results and conclusions, the resource types of the "content provider - content construction" were mainly used for the physical collections and social networks; the resource types of the "content providers - sustainable maintenance" were mainly used for the social networks and digital technology; the resource types of the "content providers - R & D", "consultant - translation" and "consultant – interpretation” " were used for the physical collections, social networks, digital resources and digital technology. On the routine work context, the main types of resources used by historical scholars are physical collections, social networks, and digital resources; the types of resources used by anthropologists are physical collections and social networks, whether or not digital resources and digital technologies were adopted depends on research topics. This study proposes suggestions for the development of subject areas and operational practices: 1) the development of subject areas: firstly, in the field of LIS, the theoretical model and information field analysis developed in this research can be used for reference in the field of information behavior research, in order to advance understanding of the information behavior characteristics of digital humanities’ scholars, and to design further resource services. Library and information course should include research topics in cross-disciplinary fields of digital humanities, and invite humanities experts and scholars to give speeches or organize workshops to stimulate more dialogues and collaborative researches. Research methodology can refer to the overall design of this study, and select methodologies which are suitable for use in different stages of the research process, it will help to collect and produce the most diverse research results. Secondly, in the development of digital humanities, social network applications are more common and diverse, and cross-domain theoretical methods can be used to conduct research related to digital humanities social networks due to the attributes of the interdisciplinary field. 2) Operational practices: resource services offered by information agencies continue to play a key role in providing physical collections or digital image files, coordinating and allocating resources, consulting technical or resource standards, and digital tools. In term of the operation of digital humanities projects, the allocation of planning funds must be fine-tuned according to the type of project. The ASCDC should be transformed into a permanent institution, in order to formed alliances with relevant institutions or establish communication channels for talent cultivation and exchange. Future research directions include: First is the study on digital humanities research. The architecture of the study can be adopted to conduct a comparative study on other digital humanities institutions. Secondly, in the study of digital humanities as ab interdisciplinary research. The channels of information exchanges or sharing between members of the cross-disciplinary team can be observed deeply within some digits humanities projects. Lastly, the comparative study of digital humanities research platforms. Explore and compare the issues between different institutions, users, interfaces and digital tools of digital humanities research platforms which are developed by various institutions.