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 research infrastructures lack adequate support for the creation, management, sharing, maintenance, and preservation of complex, networked digital objects. While Research Objects (ROs) have primarily been oriented toward scientific research workflows, the RO model and parallel approaches have gained some uptake in the humanities, enough to suggest their potential to undergird sustainable, networked humanities research infrastructures. This paper reviews several compelling applications in the humanities of the RO and closely related models, in platforms for data sharing, computational workflows, collaborative annotation, digital and semantic publishing, and repositories in several domains. The goal of this paper is to elaborate challenges confronting the application of ROs to digital humanities scholarship, and suggest implications for the implementation of ROs and related models in humanities cyberinfrastructure.