Unpacking the “Black Box”: A Preliminary Study of Visualizing Humanists and Social Science Scholars’ Data and Research Processes

Abstract

Due to the significant variations in their needs, attitudes, and practices toward their research, different scholars could have different research processes and interact with different kinds of data. We report the preliminary results of a qualitative study that examines how humanities and social science (H&SS) scholars interact with their data throughout the course of their research process. By conducting two focus group sessions with eight H&SS scholars, our results show that scholars indeed took different research patterns and thus interacted with distinctive data. The sketches produced in this study provide insights on future larger-scale focus group design, and also identify opportunities for an academic library or data service provider to support H&SS scholars’ research activities.