Meeting of the Mind

Connecting research questions to Ten Things That Humanities Researchers Want

The summer meet-up of the New England Chapter of ASIS&T (NEASIST) discussed Research Information Network, “Reinventing research?  Information practices in the humanities,” summarized as “10 things that humanities researchers want.”  Beyond “make it easy to use” (the perpetual demand for computers to read minds and divine complex concepts from simple short inputs), there is an expressed desire for ways to visualize collections: “exploring and conceptualising a collection through features such as maps, timelines and word lists.”  This would seem to point to non-verbal information retrieval interfaces, which are still in the primitive stages after all these years.