Funded by Kone Foundation 2007-2009.
The aim of research project is to evaluate the benefits of e-Science infrastructures based on participatory digital archive in humanities oriented research and to frame the critical success factors of e-Science in small geographically dispersed research group. The study aims to answer the questions by addressing the specific issues of
- how the system was used,
- how it benefited the work of the researchers and
- what was especially difficult.
Same time the study aims at developing the concept and technical implementations for participatory archival systems. The emphasis of the e-Science related research initiatives on large infrastructures and hard sciences leaves an evident gap in the smaller scale human centred research even though there is no reason to believe that the emerging benefits would be less significant. The central outcome of the research is to provide an example how to create an inexpensive lightweight e-Science infrastructure for a group of researchers and to frame the emerging benefits and difficulties encountered in the process. Besides the actual archive and the provision of empirical data for developing it in the future, the present study informs the development of interoperable e-Science infrastructures for humanities research in general. The developed system and the scheme of information organisation can be used with minor modifications in other contexts with other collections and research projects. Further, the both can be used as references for developing similar systems for larger and smaller scale use.
The project is funded by the Kone Foundation http://www.koneensaatio.fi/
