Uda, N. Laboratory

Construction of data platform based on analysis of humanities researchers’ information seeking behavior (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), Principal Investigator: Norihiko Uda, FY2022-FY2025)

Humanities, such as philosophy, literature, and history, are research fields that involves reading a large amount of materials, understands and interpreting them, finding connections, adding one’s own opinions, and summarizing them into sentences. In the process of reading, understanding, and interpreting, the number of materials to be searched increases, so the process of searching for materials and the process of research proceed in parallel. Because of this, scholars’ search for materials inevitably becomes more individualistic, and the existing systems for searching for materials, which emphasize versatility, can not sufficiently support their search for materials. Therefore, this project aims to construct a material search platform that has an intermediate character between individuality and generality by investigating and categorizing the material search behavior of researchers in the humanities.

In humanities research, material search itself is a part of research, and is a process of finding new relationship by carefully reading seemingly unrelated materials and adding humanistic considerations between them. In this research, we will interview humanities researchers about how they conducted material search in their research process by asking authors to explain their books and articles and categorize them based on multiple cases. On the base of the results, we aim to identify the functional requirements of a material search platform as a place for co-creation useful for humanities researchers, and finally build the platform. We are looking for students who are interested in both humanities materials and construction of information system.