Software solutions for web information systems in digital humanities: review, analysis and comparative study

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2022.mar.11

Keywords:

Web information systems, Digital humanities, Content management systems, Digital assets management, Virtual research environments, Crowdsourcing, Comparative analysis, Software review

Abstract

Research in the humanities increasingly depends on how information is structured and managed and how, on the basis of that information, new knowledge is produced. Additionally, participatory approaches, which often rely on web information systems as their supportive infrastructure, have made an impact on the most recent historiographical trends, in particular in the methodological framework of digital humanities. The aim of this paper was to produce, from an operational and implementation perspective, a review of software solutions frequently used to develop web information systems for research projects in humanities and cultural heritage, in order to provide an understanding of the various possibilities available and their positives and limitations, also based on different users´ requirements. An individual and comparative analysis of sixteen different application frameworks commonly used in these fields, either generic or developed for a specific research domain, has been carried out, considering their main functionalities, strengths, and weaknesses. The achieved results facilitate critical and reasoned decision-making among several available options, guiding the makers of those systems, both researcher(s) and developers(s), and providing them also with a common ground of terms and use cases to facilitate their necessary dialogue.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Alcaraz-Martí­nez, Rubén (2012). "Omeka: exposicions virtuals i distribució de col·leccions digitals". BiD: Textos universitaris de biblioteconomia i documentació, v. 28. https://raco.cat/index.php/BiD/article/view/256877

Alcaraz-Martí­nez, Rubén (2014). "CollectiveAccess, un sistema de gestión y difusión de colecciones de museos, archivos y bibliotecas". BiD: Textos universitaris de biblioteconomia i documentació, v. 33. https://doi.org/10.1344/BiD2014.33.23

Blanke, Tobias; Candela, Leonard; Hedges, Mark; Priddy, Mike; Simeoni, Fabio (2010). "Deploying general-purpose virtual research environments for humanities research". Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, v. 368, n. 1925, pp. 3813-3828. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2010.0167

Bocanegra-Barbecho, Lidia (2020). "Ciencia ciudadana y memoria histoÌrica: nuevas pers- pectivas historiograÌficas desde las humanidades digitales y la historia puÌblica Digital". In: Caro, Jorge; Dí­az-de-la-Fuente, Silvia; Ahedo, Virginia; Zurro, Débora; Madella, Marco; Galán, José-Manuel; Izquierdo, Luis R.; Santos, José-Ignacio; Del-Olmo, Ricardo. Terra incognita: Libro blanco sobre transdisciplinariedad y nuevas formas de investigacioÌn en el Sistema Español de Ciencia y TecnologiÌa. PressBooks. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4034177

Bocanegra-Barbecho, Lidia; Toscano, Maurizio; Delgado-AneÌs, Lara (2017). "Co-creacioÌn, participacioÌn y redes sociales para hacer historia. Ciencia con y para la sociedad". Historia y comunicacioÌn social, v. 22, n. 2, pp. 325-346. https://doi.org/10.5209/HICS.57847

Bree, Pim; Kessels, Geert (2013). Nodegoat: a web-based data management, network analysis & visualisation environment. https://nodegoat.net

Brown, William J.; Malveau, Raphael C.; McCormick, Hays W.; Mowbray, Thomas J. (1998). AntiPatterns: refactoring software, architectures, and projects in crisis. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ISBN: 978 0 471 19713 3

Budin, Gerhard (2015). "Digital humanities, language industry, and multilingualism: global networking and innovation in collaborative methods". In: CIUTI-Forum 2014: Pooling academic excellence with entrepreneurship for new partnerships. Peter Lang, pp. 423-448. ISBN: 978 3 034315708

Burdick, Anne; Drucker, Johanna; Lunenfeld, Peter; Presner, Todd; Schnapp, Jeffrey (2013). Digital_humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN: 978 0 262528863

Candela, Leonardo; Castelli, Donatella; Pagano, Pasquale (2013). "Virtual research environments: an overview and a research agenda". Data science journal, v. 12, pp. GRDI75-GRDI81. https://doi.org/10.2481/dsj.GRDI-013

Care (2020). Corpus architecturae religiosae europeae (IV-X saec.). https://care.huma-num.fr/care/index.php

Carlisle, Philip K.; Avramides, Ioannis; Dalgity, Alison; Myers, David (2014). "The Arches heritage inventory and management system: a standards-based approach to the management of cultural heritage information". Cidoc (International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums), v. 8. https://www.wmf.org/publication/arches-heritage-inventory-and-management-system-standards-based-approach-management

Causer, Tim; Wallace, Valerie (2012). "Building a volunteer community: results and findings from transcribe bentham". Digital humanities quarterly, v. 6, n. 2. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/2/000125/000125.html

Chevalier, Pascale; Granjon, Ludovic; Leclercq, í‰ric; Millereux, Arnaud; Savonnet, Marinette; Sapin, Christian (2012). "Base de données annotées et wiki pour la constitution du corpus numérique CARE". Hortus artium medievalium, v. 18, n. 1, pp. 27-35. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.HAM.1.102782

Cimiano, Philipp; Chiarcos, Christian; McCrae, John P.; Gracia, Jorge (2020) "Linguistic linked data in digital humanities". Linguistic linked data. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30225-2_13

Davis, Edie; Heravi, Bahareh (2021). "Linked data and cultural heritage: a systematic review of participation, collaboration, and motivation". Journal on computing and cultural heritage, v. 14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3429458

Dombrowski, Quinn (2016a). "Drupal and other content management systems". In: Crompton, Constance; Lane, Richard; Siemens, Ray. Doing digital humanities. Practice, training, research. London: Routledge, pp. 289-302. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315707860

Dombrowski, Quinn (2016b). Drupal for humanists (coding for humanists). Texas A&M University Press. ISBN: 978 1 623494728

Dombrowski, Quinn (2018). Enterprise tools and DH. Stanford | Digital humanities. https://digitalhumanities.stanford.edu/enterprise-tools-and-dh

Gallini, Stefania; Noiret, Serge (2011). "La historia digital en la era del web 2.0. Introducción al dossier historia digital". Historia crí­tica, v. 43, pp. 16-37. http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0121-16172011000100003

Gilgado, José M. (2014). Avoiding the law of the instrument. Josemdev. https://josemdev.com/avoiding-the-law-of-the-instrument

GonzaÌlez-PeÌrez, César (2018). Information modelling for archaeology and anthropology. Software engineering principles for cultural heritage. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72652-6

Gruber, Ethan (2010). Building Omeka exhibits with Fedora repository content | Scholars´ Lab. https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/building-omeka-exhibits-with-fedora-repository-content

Hedges, Mark; Dunn, Stuart (2018). Academic crowdsourcing in the humanities. Chandos Publishing. ISBN: 978 0 081009413

Hirschheim, Rudy; Klein, Heinz (2012). "A glorious and not-so-short history of the information systems field". Journal of the association for information systems, v. 13, n. 4. https://doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00294

Jiménez, í€ngels (2003). "Digital asset management: la gestión de la información multimedia en las organizaciones". El profesional de la información, v. 12, n. 6, pp. 452-461. http://profesionaldelainformacion.com/contenidos/2003/noviembre/4.pdf

Kaldeli, Eirini; Menis-Mastromichalakis, Orfeas; Bekiaris, Spyros; Ralli, Maria; Tzouvaras, Vassilis; Stamou, Giorgos (2021). "CrowdHeritage: crowdsourcing for improving the quality of cultural heritage metadata". Information, v. 12, n. 2, 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12020064

Krí¤utli, Florian; Valleriani, Matteo (2018). "CorpusTracer: A Cidoc database for tracing knowledge networks". Digital scholarship in the humanities, v. 33, n. 2, pp. 336-346. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqx047

Lenz, Kirsten; Oberweis, Andreas (1998). "Design of world wide web information systems". In: Classification, data analysis, and data highways, pp. 262-269. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-72087-1_29

Martí­nez-Caro, José-Manuel; Aledo-Hernández, Antonio-José; Guillén-Pérez, Antonio; Sánchez-Iborra, Ramón; Cano, Marí­a-Dolores (2018). "A comparative study of web content management systems". Information, v. 9, n. 2, 27. https://doi.org/10.3390/info9020027

Nishanbaev, Ikrom; Champion, Erik; McMeekin, David (2019). "A survey of geospatial semantic web for cultural heritage". Heritage, v. 2, n. 2, pp. 1471-1498. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage2020093

Noiret, Serge (2018). "Digital public history". In: Dean, David (ed.). A companion to public history. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., pp. 111-124. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118508930.ch7

Oldman, Dominic; Tanase, Diana (2018). "Reshaping the knowledge graph by connecting researchers, data and practices in researchspace". In: VrandeÄić, Denny; Bontcheva, Kalina; Suárez-Figueroa, Mari-Carmen; Presutti, Valentina; Celino, Irene; Sabou, Marta; Kaffee, Lucie-Aimée; Simperl, Elena. The semantic web - ISWC 2018. Springer, v. 11137, pp. 325-340. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00668-6_20

Oomen, Johan; Aroyo, Lora (2011). "Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain: opportunities and challenges". Proceedings of the 5th international conference on communities and technologies - C&T "˜11, pp. 138-149. https://doi.org/10.1145/2103354.2103373

Pons, Anaclet (2018). "El pasado fue analoÌgico, el futuro es digital. Nuevas formas de escritura histórica". Ayer, v. 110, pp. 19-50. https://revistaayer.com/sites/default/files/articulos/110-1-ayer110_HistDigital_APons_MEiroa.pdf

Ridge, Mia (2014). Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage. Ashgate: Routledge. ISBN: 978 1 472410221

RodriÌguez-Ortega, Nuria (2018). "Cinco ejes para pensar las humanidades digitales como proyecto de un nuevo humanismo digital". Artnodes, v. 22. https://doi.org/10.7238/a.v0i22.3263

Ruest, Nick; Stapelfeldt, Kirsta (2014). Introduction to Islandora. YorkSpace Repository. http://hdl.handle.net/10315/28006

Rutherford, Eleanor; Hemati, Wahed; Mehler, Alexander (2018). "Corpus2Wiki: a mediawiki based annotation & visualisation tool for the digital humanities". In: Burghardt, Manuel; Mí¼ller-Birn, Claudia (eds.). INF-DH-2018. Bonn: Gesellschaft fí¼r Informatik e.V. https://doi.org/10.18420/INFDH2018-08

Sánchez-Nogales, Elena (2019). "ComunidadBNE: el proyecto de enriquecimiento colaborativo de la Biblioteca Nacional de España". Mi biblioteca: la revista del mundo bibliotecario, v. 59, pp. 68-72.

Scheuermann, Leif; Kroeze, Jan H. Hendrik (2017). "Digital humanities and information systems: innovating two research traditions". AMCIS 2017 Proceedings. 3. https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2017/PhilosophyIS/Presentations/3

Scholz, Martin; Gí¶rz, Guenther (2012). "WissKI: a virtual research environment for cultural heritage". ECAI, pp. 1017-1018. https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-098-7-1017

Sciotti, Elisa (2019). "Il transcribathon: un nuovo approccio alle lettere manoscritte risalenti alla Grande Guerra". DigItalia, v. 2, pp. 116-122. http://digitalia.sbn.it/article/view/2174/1503

Simpson, Robert; Page, Kevin R.; De Roure, David (2014). "Zooniverse: observing the world´s largest citizen science platform". Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on world wide web, pp. 1049-1054. https://doi.org/10.1145/2567948.2579215

Sommerville, Ian (2005). Ingenierí­a del software. Pearson Educación SA. ISBN: 84 7829 074 5

Stapelfeldt, Kirsta; Moses, Donald (2013). "Islandora and TEI: current and emerging applications/approaches". Journal of the text encoding initiative, v. 5. https://doi.org/10.4000/jtei.790

Terras, Melissa (2016). "Crowdsourcing in the digital humanities". In: Schreibman, Susan; Siemens, Ray; Unsworth, John (eds.). A new companion to digital humanities, 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 420-439. ISBN: 978 1 118 68059 9

Toscano, Maurizio (2018). "Where the researcher cannot get: open platforms to collaborate with citizens on cultural heritage research data". In: Romero-FriÌas, Esteban; Bocanegra-Barbecho, Lidia (eds.). Ciencias sociales y humanidades digitales aplicadas. Granada: Universidad de Granada, pp. 538-561. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1469337

Toscano, Maurizio; Rabadán, Aroa; Ros, Salvador; González-Blanco, Elena (2020). "Digital humanities in Spain: historical perspective and current scenario". Profesional de la información, v. 29, n. 6. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.nov.01

Transcribe Bentham (2021). Transcription desk. http://transcribe-bentham.ucl.ac.uk/td/Transcribe_Bentham

Velios, Athanasios; Martin, Aurelie (2017). "Off-the-shelf CRM with Drupal: a case study of documenting decorated papers". International journal on digital libraries, v. 18, n. 4, pp. 321-331. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-016-0191-5

Whitten, Jeffrey L.; Bentley, Lonnie D.; Dittman, Kevin C. (2004). Systems analysis and design methods. McGraw-Hill Irwin. ISBN: 978 0 071215213

Wiberg, Andrew (2014). "Murkuntu: information retrieval system engineered for indigenous individuals and communities". In: IFLA WLIC 2014, 16-22 August 2014, Lyon, France. http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/922

Published

2022-03-26

How to Cite

Toscano, M., Cobo, M. J., & Herrera-Viedma, E. (2022). Software solutions for web information systems in digital humanities: review, analysis and comparative study. Profesional De La información, 31(2). https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2022.mar.11