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The concept of “scholarly primitive” has been widely welcomed both by humanists and system designers in the humanities, due to the fact that it made it possible to have a solid conceptual basis for the operationalization of the essential functionalities required for advancing computer-mediated work in the humanities. It has also helped to prioritize, and to provide general frameworks for the analysis of system requirements, which otherwise would have remained vague, or too specifically tied to the particular projects. However, in the design of actual systems or digital infrastructures, most initiatives that have tried to apply the concept of “scholarly primitive” have acknowledged the importance of looking at the relationship between them (e.g., Palmer et al., 2009), but haven't framed these primitives or activities within the larger workflows in which researchers transition from one activity to the other, or perform multiple connected activities in tandem. One of the most fully-fledged conceptual models for scholarly research activity based on scholarly primitives was developed by DARIAH (note 1). Grounded in conceptual and empirical research, this conceptual model aims to fit the needs of the actual research life-cycle (Benardou, 2013), with the resulting NeDiMAH (note 2) Methods Ontology (NeMO) centered around a list of research activities, which are hierarchically connected by means of a taxonomical structure. We have developed a process perspective that can help to understand how these activities are interconnected. For example, the activity “gathering” is defined by the NeMO ontology as “aggregating discovered resources [...] for further analysis.” (note 3). While this normalization of the activity name and definition is useful for several purposes in system design, the NeMO ontology makes no connection to the activities that occur during “discovering” or “analysis”, which makes it difficult to understand how “gathering” occurs in practice, and how it works in real contexts where other activities precede, succeed, or occur simultaneously to the “gathering” activity. The lack of understanding of the scholarly primitives (or of the research activities) in a workflow perspective has negative implications in designing systems that support the research life-cycle. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces the concept of “workflow transitions” and presents investigations of scholarly work using this concept. The method we propose consists of selecting a sample of representative “research projects” (Koolen et al., 2020) and use them as the unit of analysis for the study of workflows and workflow transitions. We developed our approach through analysing the research process of two digital humanities projects in great detail, by interviewing the project collaborators (using Critical Incident Technique), studying their papers and looking at datasets, tools and scripts. In this paper we will present the resulting workflow visualizations, the findings of our analysis and their implications for digital infrastructure support for humanities research.

This white paper primarily served as an internal working document for the DARIAH ERIC. We inspected current service policies and practices across ERIC’s with an emphasis on social sciences and humanities. We summarised earlier analysis of the DARIAH service portfolio. The ultimate purpose of the paper was to create a common ground of understanding what DARIAH services are and how to develop governance and management around them. Still, when writing this paper, we realised that others might encounter similar questions in their quest, and so could learn from our exploration.

International audience; Academic libraries in the Netherlands have the ambition to increase the knowledge level of their librarians on digital humanities (DH). Three libraries therefore set up a series of full-day training events aimed specifically at library professionals of academic and research libraries in the Netherlands, named DH Clinics. The aim of these clinics is to provide basic methodological competencies and technical skills in DH, for a diverse group of library employees, consisting of both subject and technical librarians with basic technical skills. The content of these sessions should 1) enable them to provide services to researchers and students, 2) identify remaining gaps in knowledge or skills that they could address by self-directed learning and 3) (possibly) to automate their daily library work. This paper describes final schedule of the DH Clinics, how we organised the design process by involving the user community and the lessons we learned.

This report addresses the ARIADNE project objectives and the framework of the impact evaluation, summarises the overall results, and gives recommendations for ARIADNE and other stakeholders with a focus on potential further advances.

Within the DARIAH research infrastructure the need to collect, disseminate and monitor the contributions offered to the infrastructure has always been present. Work package 5 of the DARIAH Humanities at Scale (HaS) project has explored and described the activities and structure required to sustain these needs, resulting in the DARIAH contributions concept and procedure including a supporting online tool.The contributions to the DARIAH infrastructure consist either of services, being repeatable actions, or activities, which have a more unique/ one-time character. They are collected for several reasons. First of all, dissemination to the Arts & Humanities (A&H) community; contributions offered to the infrastructure need to be visible to the users within the community, so they can be found and used. Secondly the compatibility of the contributions to the infrastructure; how compatible are the contributions to the infrastructure, how easily can they be (re)used and/or combined with other services and last but not least monitoring of the variety and maturity of contributions as it is essential for the strategic planning and future development of the infrastructure.The HaS project has developed an online tool that supports the collection of the contribution so they can be disseminated to the community. The contributions will be visible in the online tool, which in time will feed into the ‘marketplace’ that DARIAH is developing. Next to the contributions, the DARIAH marketplace will give access to a wide range of information relevant to the A&H community.Furthermore, the tool enables contributors to self-assess their contribution according to criteria provided by DARIAH in order to see how compatible their contribution is to the infrastructure. These self-assessments are then peer-reviewed, on the basis of trust, by reviewers appointed by the infrastructure, which – when approved - are given a score that results in one of three tiers of compatibility to the infrastructure.Finally, the tool can produce real time reports to monitor the diversity and capability of offered contributions, which subsequently can be utilised in outlining next steps for the infrastructure and its evolution.