Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 133.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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    [1]    From: David Zeitlyn <david.zeitlyn@anthro.ox.ac.uk>
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.131: what is research (25)

    [2]    From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.131: what is research (20)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2025-09-15 10:28:30+00:00
        From: David Zeitlyn <david.zeitlyn@anthro.ox.ac.uk>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.131: what is research

"What is research?" is one of those questions that are easy to ask but
perhaps impossible to answer. (Impossible to answer *in general* as
Willard hints).

A way of addressing some of the issues that provokes the question comes
through the idea of 'Scholarly Primitives' - activities that all
researchers do one way or another

See

Blanke, Tobias & Hedges, Mark 2013. Scholarly primitives: Building
institutional infrastructure for humanities e-Science. Future Generation
Computer Systems, 29, 654-661. DOI 10.1016/j.future.2011.06.006

They identify 5 activities: searching, collecting, reading, writing and
collaborating

Differently realised in different disciplines but realised one way or
another...

Hope this helps

best wishes

david

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2025-09-15 09:45:58+00:00
        From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.131: what is research

As always, great questions. Did your computer science colleague have interests
very different from your own that had very little overlap and were focused on
computer science itself?

Your other colleague, presumably in the humanities, did he see archival research
and historical research primarily as "real" research? That would be as opposed
to reading primary and secondary literature and developing new ways of thinking
about it.

Jim R

Sent from my iPhone

> In response to the CFP Friday last, some memories of situations
> provoking that question.
>
> One is a statement of a colleague some years back, himself a fine
> researcher, who considering his department of many colleagues, exclaimed
> that no one was doing 'research'. From my perspective, he was wrong, but
> in a sense worth some thought.


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