Interactivity, Distributed Workflows, and Thick Provenance: A Review of Challenges Confronting Digital Humanities Research Objects

Despite the rapid growth of digital scholarship in the humanities, most existing humanities research infrastructures lack adequate support for the creation, management, sharing, maintenance, and preservation of complex, networked digital objects. Research Objects (ROs) have mainly been applied to scientific research workflows, but the RO model and parallel approaches have gained enough uptake in the humanities to suggest their potential to undergird sustainable, networked humanities research infrastructure. This paper reviews several compelling applications in the humanities of RO and closely related models in platforms for data sharing, computational text analysis, collaborative annotation, digital and semantic publishing, and in domain repositories. The paper identifies challenges confronting the broad application of ROs in the humanities—which challenges will confront any emergent model for humanities data-or workflow-packaging and publication—and suggests implications for implementations in humanities cyberinfrastructure.