The LAIRAH project is funded by the AHRC ICT Strategy Scheme

Claire Warwick

Melissa Terras

Paul Huntington

Nikoleta Pappa

CIBER

Project Summary

The LAIRAH survey will investigate the use of online digital resources in the humanities to determine whether they are sustainable and, how, and why they are used. No systematic studies of the use of such resources has been undertaken, and LAIRAH aims to provide comprehensive, quantitative, qualitative, and robust measures for evaluation of real-time use, utilising deep log analysis techniques on automatically recorded server data. This analysis will provide the basis for follow-up qualitative work. The findings will aid the selection of projects for future funding, and provide evaluatory measures for new projects developing digital online resources for the humanities

Objectives

We shall seek to determine:

• Actual use levels of different projects, using deep log analysis.
• Whether certain characteristics (disciplinary associations) or media (text, images) have an impact on use.
• The impact of institutional features such as departmental experts, internal culture, funding and management.
• The effect of user consultation about design on eventual resource usage.
• Whether neglected digital resources can be reused effectively if potential users are (re)introduced to them.

These measures are designed to determine why projects are successful, where any digital inequalities occur, and if digital rollouts simply improve access to those who already have it, rather than providing greater access to those with poor resources.

People

The project team is comprised of Dr Claire Warwick (principal investigator) and Dr Melissa Terras and Paul Huntington, senior research felow at CIBER (co-investigators) and Nikoleta Pappa, the research fellow on the project.