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Abstract

The principal aim of ICTGuides is to establish a database containing detailed information on current and recent humanities research-projects using ICT and in particular, the computational methods and tools employed by them. It is specifically designed to assist arts and humanities researchers build quality digital projects and resources within the field of the digital humanities.

During the first stage of development, the projects chosen to populate the database primarily derive from successfully AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) funded projects in the UK. In listing projects that have been created within a funding council context, it is hoped that the community of practitioners will grow to discuss the issues leading to the creation of further high-quality projects.

Of particular importance is the methods section of the databases that utilises a taxonomy or ‘controlled vocabulary'. It is designed to describe the computational methods used for the creation, analysis and dissemination of digital humanities projects. Researchers are invited to provide details of their projects and choose the terms from the taxonomy that indicate the methods employed in their project. By gathering information about methods in a controlled fashion, the methods can be communicated to other researchers who wish to undertake similar investigations.

In this paper I will present ICTGuides and outline its present and future development. The site is being developed as part of a Virtual Research Environment at King’s College that will utilise Web 2 techniques and a service-orientated architecture. As part of this, the methods taxonomy of the site is being developed as a service to be exported and utilised by other arts and humanities projects. It is being exported using the W3C developed Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS).

As a member of the W3C’s semantic web activities, SKOS promises to allow taxonomies to be used in distributed, decentralised metadata applications, and has been adopted for use by large-scale thesaurus construction efforts like the UK Archival Thesaurus. Future areas for research will be suggested in this presentation including trials to investigate using ICTGuides’ taxonomy to automatically classify distributed digital humanities resources.