“A greatly unexplored area”: Digital curation and innovation in digital humanities

What is it about?

New forms of digital data, tools, and methods, for instance those that cross academic disciplines and domains, those that feature teams of scholars instead of single scholars, and those that involve persons from outside the academy, can enable new forms of scholarship and teaching in the digital humanities. Such scholarship can promote reuse of digital data, provoke new research questions, and cultivate new audiences. Digital curation, the process of managing a trusted body of information for current and future use, can help maximize the value of research in the digital humanities. Predicated upon semi-structured interviews, this naturalistic case study explores the creation, use, storage, and planned reuse of data by 45 interviewees involved with nineteen Office of Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (SUG) projects. The study seeks to determine what digital curation skills had been employed in these projects. Interviewees grapple with challenges surrounding data, collaboration and communication, planning and project management, awareness and outreach, resources, and technology. Overall, this study explores the existing digital curation practices and needs of scholars engaged in innovative digital humanities work.

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