Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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or more documents (69 percent) and to view a text concordance (61 percent). In sum, a large number
of e-humanists desired to have some type of <strong>in</strong>stitutional <strong>in</strong>frastructure for their work but displayed a
lack of knowledge about what types of resources were available.
Another series of questions gauged participants’ access to primary and secondary sources. Over 90
percent of respondents rated search eng<strong>in</strong>es as highly useful for f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>g e-texts and analysis tools, and
over 78 percent wanted to be able to view lists of available e-texts. Survey respondents also wanted a
reasonably high level of structure for their e-texts: 71 percent wanted to be able to restrict their search
terms by chapter, 53 percent wanted to restrict it by a character <strong>in</strong> a play or novel, and 48 percent
wanted to search on the level of the <strong>in</strong>dividual paragraph. These results are <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>g s<strong>in</strong>ce many
participants also reported that they preferred no markup <strong>in</strong> their texts, and search<strong>in</strong>g at these levels of
granularity requires at least basic structural markup (e.g., chapters, pages, paragraphs) and, <strong>in</strong> the case
of novel characters, semantic markup (e.g., TEI).
The f<strong>in</strong>al series of questions <strong>in</strong>volved scholarly communication and collaboration, and the large
majority of answers seemed to confirm the picture of humanists, even self-identified e-humanists, as
solitary researchers. 574 As Toms and O’Brien reported, almost half of respondents worked alone. In
addition, a majority had not conducted research with colleagues (55 percent) or graduate students (64
percent). An even larger number of researchers (87 percent) reported that they did not tend to discuss
their work before it was formally submitted: less than 40 percent shared ideas at early stages of
research and more than half had not consulted colleagues at all. While their research had confirmed the
picture of the humanist as a solitary scholar, the authors proposed that this was perhaps due more to the
nature of work <strong>in</strong> the humanities rather than to personal qualities:
This does not, however, mean that humanists are not collegial; it may be more fitt<strong>in</strong>g to say that
humanists communicate with each other rather than collaborate, s<strong>in</strong>ce collaboration implies
work<strong>in</strong>g together—build<strong>in</strong>g—and the humanists’ work is all about deconstruct<strong>in</strong>g ideas and
dissect<strong>in</strong>g texts (Toms and O’Brien 2008).
To facilitate greater collaboration <strong>in</strong> the future, Toms and O’Brien suggested that an e-humanist
workbench should provide a variety of communication and collaboration tools.
Tom and O’Brien concluded that this encapsulated view of digital humanists at work illustrated that
“clearly, humanities research is <strong>in</strong>tricate and diverse.” They were surprised both by the relatively low
level of technology use with<strong>in</strong> the classroom and by the fact that for many respondents the use of
technology simply <strong>in</strong>volved deliver<strong>in</strong>g read<strong>in</strong>g materials from a course website. Another notable
f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>g, accord<strong>in</strong>g to Toms and O’Brien, was that search eng<strong>in</strong>es were used as often as library catalogs
to locate both primary and secondary sources, a practice that marked a significant change from many
of the earlier studies they had found. Library tools were typically used for well-def<strong>in</strong>ed topics, and
brows<strong>in</strong>g rema<strong>in</strong>ed a preferred method for f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>formation. As a result of these f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs, they
decided that an e-humanities workbench should <strong>in</strong>clude a web search capability as well as l<strong>in</strong>ks to
catalogs, f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>g aids, and archives. A scholar should also be able to personalize the workbench with
his or her own list of relevant websites and digital libraries.
574 Similar conclusions were reached by Palmer et al. <strong>in</strong> their overview of onl<strong>in</strong>e scholarly <strong>in</strong>formation behavior across discipl<strong>in</strong>es: “Thus, humanities
scholars and other researchers deeply engaged <strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>terpret<strong>in</strong>g source material rely heavily on brows<strong>in</strong>g, collect<strong>in</strong>g, reread<strong>in</strong>g and notetak<strong>in</strong>g. They tend to
compile a wide variety of sources and work with them by assembl<strong>in</strong>g, organiz<strong>in</strong>g, read<strong>in</strong>g, analyz<strong>in</strong>g and writ<strong>in</strong>g. In <strong>in</strong>teract<strong>in</strong>g with colleagues, they
typically consult rather than collaborate, with the notion of the lone scholar persist<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> certa<strong>in</strong> fields” (Palmer et al. 2009, 37).