Evaluation of Digital Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

This research, now in its first phase of development, focuses upon evaluation of Digital Humanities, here indicated as the disciplines, included within the Italian Disciplinary Areas 10 and 11, innovating their research outputs through the application of technological methods. These research outputs are relevant both quantitatively and qualitatively, but do not seem to be considered of value by the current procedures of quality evaluation. The research methodology is including a comparison of the evaluation policies and quality assurance procedures in Europe regarding the different typologies of digital publications. The final product will be a KOS (Knowledge Organization System) based on the Web standards, such as RDF and Linked Open data, to represent and organize the digital products and publications as well as the related agents (persons, institutions, etc.). The KOS will include the results derived by user studies including: 1) a toolkit that will provide rich and meaningful information about the research activity and publications in Digital Humanities. The toolkit will consist of decision tools, able to analyze the content of the proposed knowledge organization system; 2) a platform for the diffusion of Project results, including digital publications, OER for training and other communication tools. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.