Methods and Tools

By the end of this section, you should be able to….

• Understand the kinds of digital methods research infrastructures can facilitate
• Be aware of the kinds of tools offered by research infrastructures, where to find them, and the benefits they can bring to research

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Where do Methods and Tools feature in our statement?

Research infrastructures bring together diverse resources and make them usable and available for the long term in order to conduct research (either individually or collaboratively) and share the results of that research.  

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Perhaps the most obvious thing that digital research infrastructures for the arts and humanities can do for a researcher is provide services and tools that can support them in applying digital methodologies in their research.

The Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH), itself an outgrowth of an earlier, UK-based ICT Methods Network, organised itself according to the following methodological approaches:

1. Space and time
2. Information Visualisation
3. Linked Data and Ontological Methods
4. Building and Developing Digital Collections
5. Using Large Scale Textual Data
6. Digital Scholarly Editions

Although not comprehensive, this provides an overview of the kinds of approaches and questions you might expect to find solutions for in a research infrastructure.  The landscape of tools and services changes quickly, but common components of a digital research infrastructure are:

• Search and browse collections
• Curate individual research collections
• Create new data
• Work with data: to clean it, parse it, organise it, and otherwise make it more useful through some sort of transformation
• Annotate data, with text or semantic links
• Combine sources, often across sources or media types
• Share results
• Export data for reuse elsewhere (eg. via an open API)