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

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This work tends to focus on describ<strong>in</strong>g the objects of study from with<strong>in</strong> the framework of a
specific theory, rather than the more traditional human-centered systems approach of analyz<strong>in</strong>g
the goals of specific user communities and the tasks they use to achieve those goals. The
result<strong>in</strong>g tools may do an excellent job of support<strong>in</strong>g the humanities scholars’ needs for “thick
description” but often result <strong>in</strong> work practices that are <strong>in</strong>timidat<strong>in</strong>g to many scholars (for
example, the expectation that scholars will manually encode documents us<strong>in</strong>g XML) or that
emphasize topics such as authorship attribution that are far from the ma<strong>in</strong>stream of humanities
research (Audenaert and Furuta 2010).
In addition, Audenaert and Furuta reiterated an earlier po<strong>in</strong>t made by Toms and O’Brien regard<strong>in</strong>g user
studies from library and <strong>in</strong>formation science, namely, that such studies typically focus on <strong>in</strong>formation
retrieval rather than <strong>in</strong>formation use. Thus their work sought to characterize how scholars actually used
materials that they found. It exam<strong>in</strong>ed <strong>in</strong> detail how access to materials supported scholars’ research
questions and considered what types of <strong>in</strong>sights scholars ga<strong>in</strong>ed from orig<strong>in</strong>al materials and what if
any use they might make of a creative support environment (CSE). In a series of semistructured
<strong>in</strong>terviews, Audenaert and Furuta asked eight scholars why and how they worked with orig<strong>in</strong>al
sources, us<strong>in</strong>g a series of open-ended questions that focused on three research themes: (1) Why do
scholars put <strong>in</strong> the time to work with orig<strong>in</strong>al materials (2) What <strong>in</strong>formation are they look<strong>in</strong>g for
and (3) How and when do they use computers, or do they use them at all The scholars <strong>in</strong>terviewed
worked <strong>in</strong> a variety of humanities fields and <strong>in</strong>cluded two scientists who focused on the use of
historical documents.
The authors learned that scholars use orig<strong>in</strong>al source materials for a variety of reasons, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the
fact that many orig<strong>in</strong>al sources and transcriptions are now easily available. They also used orig<strong>in</strong>al
source materials to form “holistic impressions,” to ga<strong>in</strong> a sense of a text as a physical object, to
exam<strong>in</strong>e objects/sources <strong>in</strong> “nuanced detail,” to alleviate their concerns with the accuracy or
authenticity of a transcription or edition (many scholars did not want to trust the work of others and
didn’t always trust their own work without notes), and for the “aesthetics” of work<strong>in</strong>g with orig<strong>in</strong>al
documents. Even though <strong>in</strong> many cases transcriptions were considered adequate, there were still many
times when scholars <strong>in</strong>sisted that access to orig<strong>in</strong>als (digital or analog) would be essential:
While editors will try to identify and describe relevant details <strong>in</strong> their published editions, the
level of detail required, the specificity required by different l<strong>in</strong>es of research, and the need for
visual <strong>in</strong>spection makes it impractical to describe all of this <strong>in</strong>formation <strong>in</strong> secondary sources.
Consequently, many l<strong>in</strong>es of <strong>in</strong>quiry require access to source material (either directly or
through digital surrogates) even when high-quality editions are readily available (Audenaert
and Furuta 2010).
This po<strong>in</strong>t echoes the earlier discussion of Bodard and Garcés (2009), who argued that open-source
critical editions should provide access to all their source materials, so that scholars can form their own
conclusions and ask new questions.
F<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs for their second major research topic, which exam<strong>in</strong>ed what scholars were look<strong>in</strong>g for <strong>in</strong>
orig<strong>in</strong>al documents, illustrated four major themes. Scholars were <strong>in</strong>terested <strong>in</strong> textual transmission,
survey<strong>in</strong>g all the evidence and documents on a topic, identify<strong>in</strong>g all the agents who contributed to both
the creation and transmission of a text (e.g., author, audience, editors, illustrators, publishers, scribe),
and document<strong>in</strong>g the full social, political, and economic context of text. Interest<strong>in</strong>gly, the study of text
transmission, a critical task of much classical scholarship, was the most common goal of all the