Abstract
The humanities focus on understanding human beings and cultures. They include such disciplines as history, literature, and the arts. Digital humanities, defined as the application of IT to research and teaching in the humanities, is well established as a field in its own right. More particularly, research in the humanities is in demand of innovative and useful IT artifacts. This makes it a relevant application area for design science research (DSR). This also raises specific challenges to DSR researchers, due to the specific stakeholders and knowledge domains that come into play in the digital humanities. This paper focuses on prosopography, a branch of digital humanities that represents and interprets historical data, sourced from texts describing historical person’s life. Starting from typical issues addressed by prosopographical researchers, we identify relevant IT artifacts to address these issues, making DSR relevant for prosopographical research. We adapt and instantiate Hevner’s DSR framework to the specific case of prosopography, as a first step towards defining a DSR framework for the humanities more generally. Based on this adapted and instantiated DSR framework, we propose two artifacts: requirements and a methodology for prosopography. We demonstrate the methodology on a prosopography scenario.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Humanities Council of Washington, DC. Defining the humanities – A work in progress (2001). http://www.wdchumanities.org/docs/defininghumanities.pdf
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Digital Humanities 2009 – Call for papers (2009). https://mith.umd.edu/dh09/index.html%3Fpage_id=54.html
Berry, D.M.: Introduction: understanding the digital humanities. In: Berry, D.M. (ed.) Understanding Digital Humanities, pp. 1–20. Palgrave Macmillan, London (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371934_1
Stone, L.: Prosopography. Daedalus 100(1), 46–79 (1970)
Hevner, A.R., March, S.T., Park, J., Ram, S.: Design science in information systems research. MIS Q. 28(1), 75–105 (2004)
Hevner, A.R.: A three cycle view of design science research. Scand. J. Inf. Syst. 19(2), 4 (2007)
March, S.T., Smith, G.F.: Design and natural science research on information technology. Decis. Support Syst. 15(4), 251–266 (1995)
Winter, R.: Design science research in Europe. Eur. J. Inf. Syst. 17(5), 470–475 (2008)
Samuel-Ojo, O., et al.: Meta-analysis of design science research within the IS community: trends, patterns, and outcomes. In: Winter, R., Zhao, J.L., Aier, S. (eds.) DESRIST 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6105, pp. 124–138. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13335-0_9
Offermann, P., Blom, S., Schönherr, M., Bub, U.: Artifact types in information systems design science – a literature review. In: Winter, R., Zhao, J.L., Aier, S. (eds.) DESRIST 2010. LNCS, vol. 6105, pp. 77–92. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13335-0_6
Sangupamba Mwilu, O., Comyn-Wattiau, I., Prat, N.: Design science research contribution to business intelligence in the cloud – a systematic literature review. Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 63, 108–122 (2016)
Pasin, M., Bradley, J.: Factoid-based prosopography and computer ontologies: towards an integrated approach. Digit. Sch. Humanit. 30(1), 86–97 (2013)
Bradley, J., Short, H.: Texts into databases: the evolving field of new-style prosopography. Lit. Linguist. Comput. 20(Suppl.), 3–24 (2005)
Figueira, L., Vieira, M.: Modelling a Prosopography for the Roman Republic (2017). https://dh2017.adho.org/abstracts/091/091.pdf
Bradley, J., Pasin, M.: Annotation and ontology in most humanities research: accommodating a more informal interpretation context. In: NeDiMaH Ontology Workshop (2012)
Westermann, U., Jain, R.: Toward a common event model for multimedia applications. IEEE Multimedia 14(1), 19–29 (2007)
Allen, J.F.: Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals. Commun. ACM 26(11), 832–843 (1983)
Moisuc, B., Miron, A., Villanova-Olivier, M., Gensel, J.: Spatiotemporal knowledge representation in AROM-ST. In: Innovative Software Development in GIS, pp. 91–119 (2012)
National Research Council (US): Risk Analysis and Uncertainty in Flood Reduction Studies. National Academies Press, Washington, D.C. (2000)
Costa, P.C.G., Laskey, K.B., Blasch, E., Jousselme, A.L.: Towards unbiased evaluation of uncertainty reasoning: the URREF ontology. In: International Conference on Information Fusion (2012)
Akoka, J., Comyn-Wattiau, I., Lamassé, S., Du Mouza, C.: Modeling historical social networks databases. In: Proceedings of the 52nd HICCS Conference (2019)
Jarke, M., Pohl, K.: Establishing visions in context: toward a model of requirements processes. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), AIS (1993)
Genet, J.P., Idabal, H., Kouamé, T., Lamassé, S., Priol, C., Tournieroux, A.: General introduction to the stadium project. Mediev. Prosopogr. 31, 156–172 (2016)
Baskerville, R., Pries-Heje, J., Venable, J.: Soft design science methodology. In: Proceedings of the 4th DESRIST Conference. ACM, p. 9 (2009)
Patas, J., Milicevic, D., Goeken, M.: Enhancing design science through empirical knowledge: framework and application. In: Jain, H., Sinha, A.P., Vitharana, P. (eds.) DESRIST 2011. LNCS, vol. 6629, pp. 32–46. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20633-7_3
Baekgaard, L.: Conceptual model of artifacts for design science research. In: Twenty-First Americas Conference on Information Systems, Puerto Rico (2015)
Braun, R., Benedict, M., Wendler, H., Esswein, W.: Proposal for Requirements Driven Design Science Research. In: Donnellan, B., Helfert, M., Kenneally, J., VanderMeer, D., Rothenberger, M., Winter, R. (eds.) DESRIST 2015. LNCS, vol. 9073, pp. 135–151. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18714-3_9
Sommerville, I.: Software Engineering. International Computer Science Series. Addison Wesley, Boston (2004)
Verboven, K., Carlier, M., Dumolyn, J.: A short manual to the art of prosopography. In: Keats-Rohan, K.S.B. (ed.) Prosopography Approaches and Applications. A Handbook, pp. 35–69. Unit for Prosopographical Research (Linacre College), Oxford (2007)
De Ridder-Symoens, H.: Prosopografie en middeleeuwse geschiedenis: een onmogelijke mogelijkheid?. Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, 45(1) (1991)
Barbero, B.R., Ureta, E.S.: Comparative study of different digitization techniques and their accuracy. Comput.-Aided Des. 43(2), 188–206 (2011)
Sugumaran, V., Storey, V.C.: The role of domain ontologies in database design: an ontology management and conceptual modeling environment. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 31(3), 1064–1094 (2006)
Peffers, K., Tuunanen, T., Niehaves, B.: Design science research genres: introduction to the special issue on exemplars and criteria for applicable design science research. Eur. J. Inf. Syst. 27(2), 129–139 (2018)
Prat, N., Comyn-Wattiau, I., Akoka, J.: A taxonomy of evaluation methods for information systems artifacts. J. Manag. Inf. Syst. 32(3), 229–267 (2015)
Acknowledgements
This research has been partly funded by a national French grant (ANR Daphne 17-CE28-0013-01).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Akoka, J., Comyn-Wattiau, I., du Mouza, C., Prat, N. (2019). Design Science Research for the Humanities – The Case of Prosopography. In: Tulu, B., Djamasbi, S., Leroy, G. (eds) Extending the Boundaries of Design Science Theory and Practice. DESRIST 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11491. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19504-5_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19504-5_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19503-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19504-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)