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

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scholars surveyed. Another critical po<strong>in</strong>t made by Audenaert and Furuta was that s<strong>in</strong>ce many scholars
wanted to “survey all documentary evidence” related to a text or particular topic (a task they noted that
had been made more “tractable” by modern editions), cultural heritage digital library designers should
consider a “systematic survey of a collection of source documents” when creat<strong>in</strong>g digital libraries.
The third major research question explored how scholars used computers and whether they would be
will<strong>in</strong>g to use digital study and research tools <strong>in</strong> their work. The CSE that Audenaert and Furuta
contemplated creat<strong>in</strong>g would <strong>in</strong>clude support for both “<strong>in</strong>formation seek<strong>in</strong>g and externaliz<strong>in</strong>g
formative ideas.” While <strong>in</strong>formation seek<strong>in</strong>g has received a great deal of attention, Audenaert and
Furuta noted that “externaliz<strong>in</strong>g knowledge” had received less attention. 575 As the humanities research
process often <strong>in</strong>volves <strong>in</strong>timate experience with both the secondary literature and discipl<strong>in</strong>ary methods
of a field, they stated that such knowledge is both “implicit and volum<strong>in</strong>ous,” and <strong>in</strong>dividuals are often
unwill<strong>in</strong>g to formally express such knowledge (e.g., through an ontology). At the same time, their
study reflected that participants kept both detailed and systematic notes and that they usually kept them
electronically. They def<strong>in</strong>ed the scholars’ process of research as “<strong>in</strong>cremental formalism” where they
were focused on a specific f<strong>in</strong>al product such as a monograph or scholarly article. Audenaert and
Furuta thus asserted, as have many other studies cited <strong>in</strong> this report (Bowman et al. 2010, Porter et al.
2009), that scholars would benefit from both note-tak<strong>in</strong>g and annotation support and from a
comprehensive digital environment that supported all the steps of the research process from formal
notes to a f<strong>in</strong>al publishable manuscript.
One major conclusion Audenaert and Furuta drew from this research was that while digital facsimiles
were not “adequate for all research tasks,” they nonetheless played a critical role <strong>in</strong> “mediat<strong>in</strong>g”
access. In general, they noted that scholars were most concerned with the editorial contributions they
made to a digital project, and the major form of computational support desired was tools that could
help them prepare and dissem<strong>in</strong>ate their work to the larger scholarly community. While Audenaert and
Furuta acknowledged that scholars were not particularly reflective or “critically oriented” to their own
work practices, they still believed that computational support for all levels of the research process
should be provided. “To the contrary, we would suggest that the clear (and relatively easy to achieve)
benefits of apply<strong>in</strong>g technology to support the dissem<strong>in</strong>ation of scholarship, coupled with the
comfortable familiarity of exist<strong>in</strong>g discipl<strong>in</strong>ary methods,” Audenaert and Furuta articulated, “has led
the digital humanities community to overlook opportunities to critically assess how new technology
might be developed to support the formative stages of scholarship” (Audenaert and Furuta 2010).
Audenaert and Furuta argued that scholars’ work with orig<strong>in</strong>al source materials forms part of a
“complex ecosystem of <strong>in</strong>quiry” that <strong>in</strong>volves understand<strong>in</strong>g a text and its full context of creation,
transmission, and use. They def<strong>in</strong>ed this process through the SCAD model, which consists of five
components: primary objects that are studied, the multiple sources of a document (e.g., previous drafts
or copies), context (historical, literary, political, etc.), actors; and “derived forms” or the related
sources for which an orig<strong>in</strong>al text may <strong>in</strong> turn serve as the source for (e.g., text reuse and repurpos<strong>in</strong>g
of content). The ma<strong>in</strong> goal of the SCAD model, the authors expla<strong>in</strong>ed, was to serve “analytical goals”
and to be a tool that could guide designers develop<strong>in</strong>g tools for scholars rather than a formal
conceptual model for “represent<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>formation <strong>in</strong> humanities digital libraries.” Somewhat <strong>in</strong> contrast
to Benardou et al. (2010a), Audenaert and Furuta were uncerta<strong>in</strong> as to whether scholars would be
will<strong>in</strong>g to use tools that formally represented structures and relationships between <strong>in</strong>formation.
575 Some prelim<strong>in</strong>ary work on externaliz<strong>in</strong>g the methods of the humanities research process <strong>in</strong>to an actual ontology for use <strong>in</strong> system design has been
conducted by Benardou et al. (2009) for the DARIAH project and is discussed later <strong>in</strong> this paper.