Listen to Their Stories. Researchers as Users of Research Infrastructures in the Arts and Humanities

One of the best known but still not really solved problems in Research Infrastructures (RI) is how to understand and meet the needs and requirements of its users. At the national and European level, the most common method is to invite individual researchers into boards of RI consortia. However, this method seems to be insufficient for communities with a wide range of heterogeneous sub-disciplines. Collecting user stories serves as an additional method to align planned services in RI with the researchers’ needs, i.e. making sure that existing tools and services match the users’ expectations. We take a look at the different kinds of user stories in several scientific communities and the ability of the Humanities to listen and analyse stories in a mixture of qualitative, hermeneutic and quantitative methods.