Supporting and enabling digital humanities projects - planning for 2022 and the future

For part 2 of her blog on digital humanities, Jessica Kowalski reviewed the results of a survey to library and faculty staff on how vendors, such as AM, can best support the digital humanities community. Here's what Jessica learned.

In 2021, AM formed a Digital Humanities working group to learn from its global community of libraries and researchers. As part of this working group, AM surveyed its global community on how we, as a vendor, can serve as a research partner and support the digital humanities community in publishing these kinds of projects.

Through the implementation of these surveys, one developed for faculty and one for librarians, we were able to glean some insight into how we can better position ourselves as a vendor partner in supporting digital humanities initiatives.

Let's hear about the results of this survey and how we plan to support our customers in the future:

Understanding the needs of the digital humanities community

Our responses came from individuals with varied backgrounds in digital humanities.

50% of faculty respondents stated they have run multiple full digital humanities classes and/or projects compared to only 8% of library respondents stating the same.

Librarian respondents seem to be more firmly in the role of supporting digital humanities projects, as 59% stated that they have supported multiple digital humanities classes and/or projects but did not actually design or run them personally.

Digital humanities initiatives dictate specific needs

When asked about what features could be built into AM’s digitised archives that would better support teaching and research at their institution, the responses represented a wide range of views, indicating that the needs of digital humanities initiatives tend to be highly specific and unique to the needs of emerging digital scholarship programs as the field itself evolves and develops.

For example, survey respondents were fairly evenly split when it came to whether data sets related to archival content would help support digital humanities teaching and research at their institution, with 55% responding no and 45% responding yes.

There are some areas that seem to bring a stronger consensus.

For example, when asked about ready-made data visualisations related to archival content, 82% of respondents stated no, this would not better support teaching and research at their institution.

Planning for the future

In consideration of the data collected via these surveys, AM’s internal digital humanities working group has informed our strategy by adopting the mentality that, as it exists right now, digital humanities is a rapidly evolving area of study and research.

As such, we hope to best support our institutional partners in these endeavours by staying agile and tailoring our support to the unique needs of individual institutions and their digital humanities programs.

We hope to grow and evolve our support of digital humanities by:

• Focusing more effort on raising awareness of AM’s current data mining and text mining policies and offerings.
• Promoting the bespoke support offered by our Academic Engagement team in the development and execution of digital humanities projects.
• Continuing to collect and document feedback from institutions and individuals who have successfully employed AM archival data in their projects.

Furthermore, AM remains committed to supporting our customers by further developing tools to allow institutions to independently publish digital humanities projects, whether through continued support for transcription, geo-mapping or other features in Quartex.

Learn more

We’d love to hear from you on projects that you and your library would like to publish, requests you receive from researchers, or to learn about your own research needs.

Send your questions to Jessica Kowalski (jessicak@amedu.com).