The following taxonomy of DH research activities and objects has been developed for use by community-driven sites and projects that aim to structure information relevant to digital humanities and make it more easily discoverable. The taxonomy is expected to be particularly useful to endeavors aiming to collect information on digital humanities tools, methods, projects, or readings.
The taxonomy is structured into several broad goals which roughly correspond to phases of the research process. Inside each of these domains, we indicate a closed list of methods, which refer to activities within the scope of the broader goal; they specify what is being done, but do not indicate how. Methods are determined by research questions. Although this is a closed list, it may be periodically revised.
The taxonomy is intended to be supplemented by two separate open lists: techniques, which provide more specific information about how a method is being applied, and objects, which indicate the scholarly object(s) a given method or technique is being applied to. These are open lists separate from goals and methods, and a technique can be associated with more than one method.
The taxonomy does not aim to cover all methods and procedures being used in the Digital Humanities, focusing instead on a subset of relatively broad categories that are widely used and broadly understandable. The taxonomy is intended for use by a broad range of projects, and we continue to seek input from the community to ensure that the taxonomy can meet other needs.
The categories bring together a number of influences: the concept of “scholarly primitives” (Unsworth 2000), the idea of a multi-stage scholarly workflow or research lifecycle (e.g. JISC 2013), DARIAH research into modeling the research process (e.g. Benardou et al. 2010, Reiche et al. 2014) and more generally work on digital scholarly methods in the humanities (Siemens et al. 2004, Borgman 2010, Gasteiner et al 2012). Also, we have been building on the existing Methods Taxonomy of arts-humanities.net (see Anderson et al. 2010) and the existing list of Bamboo DiRT categories. Finally, we have been guided by the principle of separating research activities from research objects, and various experiences with managing earlier taxonomies.
The initial partners that have committed to adopting the taxonomy are DARIAH’s Zotero-based bibliography, the DiRT (Digital Research Tools) directory, and centerNet’s DHCommons project directory. DARIAH-EU has also committed to using this taxonomy as a basis for their development of a more complex ontology of digital scholarly methods, ensuring the continued updating and existence of the work presented here. We are engaged in ongoing dialog with other ontology initiatives, including NeDiMAH’s work around scholarly methods. Our goal is to share at least high-level categories with NeDiMAH’s ontology, so that objects (projects, tools, articles, etc.) classified using our taxonomy can be automatically “mapped” to some level of the NeDiMAH ontology, and vice versa.