ABSTRACT
How digital do you have to be to be a ‘digital humanist’? Do you have to work exclusively with digital tools, or devise questions that can only be asked using digital means to be able to call yourself a digital humanist? Or can you use all the digital tools available to you, but still identify primarily as a linguist? Or a geographer? Or a literary scholar?
This chapter discusses the notion of academic identity in the face of interdisciplinary and multi-modal research practices, particularly with a view to discovering how different research communities share knowledge, share and manage data, and use digital platforms such as Research Infrastructures. Do they choose to calling themselves ‘digital humanists', and if they don't refer to themselves in such a way, what do they identify as on a disciplinary level? Moreover, what prevents them from making use of digital knowledge sharing environments such as Research Infrastructures? Is it a lack of knowledge about the existence of the RI? Is it a lack of understanding of what the RI can do? Is it simply a case of not knowing where to start?
This work is the result of research conducted by the Community Engagement Working Group, part of the Research and Education Virtual Competency Centre (VCC2) in DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities). Within this working group, we have been developing surveys and workshops that aim to answer these questions relating to research communities. This chapter will focus specifically on two case studies to be investigated over the next 6 months, an Environmental Humanities community, and a Sociolinguistics community. Both communities make use of various digital tools as par for the course in their work, but might not necessarily identify as ‘digital’ scholars. The data and resources they use often come from a combination of fieldwork, and archival materials. Emphasis will be given to understanding and documenting the processes these communities employ in managing their research data in terms of organisation, storage, and sharing, with a nod towards Scholarly Primitives as outlined by Unsworth (2000), and Palmer et al. (2009) and methodological practices among humanists as discussed in the SPARKLE project (Edmond et al., 2016).
