Speaker: Dominic Oldman

Digital scholarship in the humanities relies heavily on, and is constrained by, the digital architecture of software tools originally designed from a business perspective. The problems humanities scholars face making effective use of digital tools lies not with their inability to learn programming skills, but with a disconnect between their ‘real world’ contexts of inquiry, and the types structured information environment that computer specialists promote as self-evident, predicated on a supposedly neutral ontology. ResearchSpace is a knowledge representation system designed to support inquiry that originates from diverse vantage points. It is a dynamic and collaborative space that offers the flexibility to integrate qualitative and quantitative abstractions and to bring together overlapping data narratives that express the specific vantage points of groups and individuals.