Digital Archives as Research Infrastructure of the Future

Abstract

While a new paradigm of scientific research based on data centres and research infrastructures is gaining ground in science, and convergence between infrastructures and scientific domains is growing in cyberspace, epistemic cultures, particularly conservative in some fields, play a significant role in the dynamics of knowledge production in general and the adoption of data-intensive scientific practices in particular. In the present study, we focus on the transformations of scholarly communication through the perspective of digital curation of research data in the humanities, which certainly belong to these conservative epistemic cultures. The aim of this paper is to explore perspectives on the evolution of data curation in the context of the transformation of scholarly communication and research infrastructure in the humanities, specifically static archives, into living, continuously enriched data archives supported by artificial intelligence tools. To explore this perspective, we have chosen to compare scholarly communication in the humanities and in high-energy physics, in addition to analysing the practices of data curation itself. We further thematize the identified differences in terms of virtual research environments that can help humanities scholars exploit the potential of data-intensive research infrastructures.

Keywords

• artificial intelligence
• digital curation
• humanities
• knowledge
• scientific research