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

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The authors also offered a number of conclusions regard<strong>in</strong>g workbench support for e-texts and text
analysis tools. To beg<strong>in</strong> with, they stated that any workbench should support the download<strong>in</strong>g, stor<strong>in</strong>g,
and organiz<strong>in</strong>g of e-texts as well as the ability to encode them <strong>in</strong> different markup languages. “With
the multiple forms of mark-up and the multiple expectations about the multiple mark-ups,” Toms and
O’Brien observed, “it is clear that “multiple views” of a text are needed for e-humanists” (Toms and
O’Brien 2008). In addition, as both availability and access to texts are critical to the work of
humanists, Toms and O’Brien argued that part of the problem is difficulty not just <strong>in</strong> identify<strong>in</strong>g what
texts have been digitized but also <strong>in</strong> ga<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g access to these texts. S<strong>in</strong>ce UNIX tools had been reported
as among the most useful, Toms and O’Brien reasoned that the workbench would need to support both
the awareness and use of already-exist<strong>in</strong>g text analysis tools through technical and peer support and
examples of what the tools can do. “Access to text-analysis tools is imperative,” Toms and O’Brien
acknowledged, “but more importantly, the development of new tools is badly needed by this
community. While TEI and TEI-lite standardized the mark-up work for humanists, similar standards
need to be developed to serve as the basis for text analysis tools, so that text with various forms of
mark-up are <strong>in</strong>terchangeable with different types of tools”(Toms and O’Brien 2008). The authors thus
make the important po<strong>in</strong>t that standards are needed not just for text markup but also for the
development of compatible text-analysis tools.
The results of the Toms and O’Brien study illustrate some important themes to be considered when
design<strong>in</strong>g a digital <strong>in</strong>frastructure for classics, namely, the need to provide a common
framework/research environment where scholars can both f<strong>in</strong>d and use exist<strong>in</strong>g text-analysis tools and
e-texts, to support granular scann<strong>in</strong>g and brows<strong>in</strong>g tools so that scholars can <strong>in</strong>teract with a text, and to
<strong>in</strong>clude sophisticated text-analysis and annotation tools for use with texts <strong>in</strong> a variety of markup
languages. Such an environment should also <strong>in</strong>clude communication and awareness technologies so
scholars can communicate regard<strong>in</strong>g projects and resources and share tools and research
methodologies.
Humanist Use of Source Materials: Digital Library Design Implications
A recent study by Neal Audenaert and Richard Furuta has offered <strong>in</strong>-depth <strong>in</strong>sights <strong>in</strong>to how humanists
use orig<strong>in</strong>al source materials (both analog and digital facsimiles) and has made a number of
recommendations for the design of humanities digital libraries. While Audenaert and Furuta conceded
that a large number of digital humanities resource collections already exist, they argued that the sole
purpose of most of these collections was to dissem<strong>in</strong>ate materials. “Digital libraries, however, hold the
potential to move beyond merely dissem<strong>in</strong>at<strong>in</strong>g resources,” Audenaert and Furuta expla<strong>in</strong>ed, “toward
creat<strong>in</strong>g environments that support the analysis required to understand them. To achieve this, we must
first develop a better understand<strong>in</strong>g of how humanities scholars (and others) use source documents <strong>in</strong>
their research” (Audenaert and Furuta 2010). To create a digital library that could provide an
environment for research as well as dissem<strong>in</strong>ate resources, Audenaert and Furuta undertook a user
study as part of a larger research program to design a “creativity support environment (CSE) to aid <strong>in</strong>depth
analysis and study of paper-based documents.”
The authors argued that there is an urgent need for this type of research because the “<strong>in</strong>terdiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary
digital humanities field” has been largely dom<strong>in</strong>ated by the humanities community, where scholars
have developed resources that simply meet their own <strong>in</strong>dividual research needs or that have embodied
“theoretical” def<strong>in</strong>itions of what digital scholarship should be. They concluded that these issues make
such resources and methodologies of limited use for <strong>in</strong>form<strong>in</strong>g large-scale systems design for the
broader humanities community: