Classical philology, text-based and Holocaust studies facing digital research infrastructures: from practice to requirements

This paper reports on research on scholarly research practices and requirements conducted in the context of the Preparing DARIAH and, subsequently, the EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure) EU-funded e-infrastructure projects. It summarises the findings of earlier research, and describes the plan of work and methodology of the empirical research designed and conducted by DCU in the context of both projects. In DARIAH, this was based on open-questionnaire interviews with arts and humanities researchers, and later formalised into a conceptual model for scholarly research activity, before presenting the finalized user requirements recommendations. In EHRI, DCU is following a mixed methods approach: the first, qualitative stage is currently under way, consisting of semi-structured interviews with a representative selection of Holocaust scholars; the second, confirmatory stage of this research plan consists of an online questionnaire survey, composed mostly of closed questions amenable to statistical summarisation and hypothesis testing. Finally, this paper presents plans for future work on user requirements for EHRI.