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Digital Workflow in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A Data Ethnography

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Anthropological Data in the Digital Age

Abstract

This chapter applies data ethnography, seeking to understand how scholars in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) produce, engage, and make sense of digital data, tools, and resources in their research practices. The study was part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation–funded Digital Scholarly Workflow project conducted at the Pennsylvania State University from 2012 to 2016, and discussed in several publications (Antonijević, Amongst Digital Humanists: An Ethnographic Study of Digital Knowledge Production. London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Antonijević and Stern-Cahoy, Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 14, 287–306, 2014, Developing Research Tools via Voices from the Field. DH+LIB Special Issue, July 2016. Retrieved from http://acrl.ala.org/dh/2016/07/29/developing-research-tools-via-voices-from-the-field/, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 12(3), 2018). The study focused on understanding how scholars in the humanities and social sciences engage with digital technologies in their research, and how their research workflows transform in the encounter with digital scholarship. Through case studies, observations, surveys, in-depth interviews, and contextual inquiry, the study sought to provide a detailed record and contextualized understanding of HSS scholars’ digital knowledge production observed close to the field. This research thus also analyzed minute details of scholarly workflows, examining how digital data, tools, and resources get integrated at different research activities. It concludes with a discussion of how data ethnography and ethnographic understanding of digital workflows can enhance understanding of digital scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, and recommendations for educational and tool development initiatives in this field.

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Acknowledgments

Portions of this chapter were previously published as Smiljana Antonijević and Ellysa Stern-Cahoy (2018), “Researcher as Bricoleur: Contextualizing humanists’ digital workflows,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 12.3; available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/12/3/000399/000399.html

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  1. Illinois Institute of Technology and BMC Software, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Smiljana Antonijević

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  1. Smiljana Antonijević
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Correspondence to Smiljana Antonijević .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX, USA

    Jerome W. Crowder

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Mike Fortun

  3. Missouri State University, Springfield, MO, USA

    Rachel Besara

  4. University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Lindsay Poirier

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Antonijević, S. (2020). Digital Workflow in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A Data Ethnography. In: Crowder, J., Fortun, M., Besara, R., Poirier, L. (eds) Anthropological Data in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24925-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24925-0_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24924-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24925-0

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