The digital transformation processes for supporting digital humanities researchers in text analysis
ISSN: 0022-0418
Article publication date: 24 November 2023
Issue publication date: 22 February 2024
Abstract
Purpose
This article aims to explore how the mapping strategies between user requirements expressed by the humanities researchers lead to a better customization of user-driven digital humanities tools and to the creation of innovative functionalities, which can directly affect the way of doing research in a digital context.
Design/methodology/approach
It describes the user-driven development of a tool that helps researchers in the quantitative and qualitative analysis of large textbook collections.
Findings
This article presents an exemplary user journey map, which shows the different steps of the digital transformation process and how the humanities researchers are involved for (1) producing innovative research solutions, comprehensive and personalized reports, and (2) customizing access to content data used for the analysis of digital documents. The article is based on a case study on a German textbooks collection and content analysis functionalities.
Originality/value
The focus of this article is the reiterative research process, in which humanists (from the human centred point of view) starts from an initial research question, using quantitative and qualitative data and develops both the research question and the answers to it by with the aim to find patterns in the content and structure of educational media. Thus, from the viewpoint of digital transformation the humanist is part of the interaction between digitization and digitalization processes, where he/she uses digital data, metadata, reports and findings created and supported by the digital tools for research analysis.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The DemoS research project, which has been financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), aimed to produce a comprehensive review of democracy education in Germany, both in practice and as a subject and objective of political education at secondary level general education and vocational schools as well as in examples of specialist teacher training. DemoS was part of the collaborative project Demokratiebildung in Deutschland (democracy education in Germany) being conducted with the German Youth Institute (DJI) which explored early childhood education in a complementary sub-project called Bildung und Demokratie mit den Jüngsten – BilDe (Education and democracy with very young children). This project enabled the GEI and the DJI to jointly contribute their research to debates on a highly relevant social topic: political decision-makers and educationalists emphatically formulate the goal of a fundamental education in democracy as a requirement for the inclusive education of children and young people in general and for school education in particular.
Since submission of this article, the following authors have updated their affiliations: Ernesto William De Luca is at Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany, Dipartimento di Scienze Ingegneristiche, Guglielmo Marconi University, Rome, Italy, Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute, Braunschweig, Germany; Francesca Fallucchi, Bouchra Ghattas and Riem Spielhaus is at Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute, Braunschweig, Germany.
Citation
De Luca, E.W., Fallucchi, F., Ghattas, B. and Spielhaus, R. (2024), "The digital transformation processes for supporting digital humanities researchers in text analysis", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 80 No. 2, pp. 378-391. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2022-0143
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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