Peer Review of RO-2

Author: Katrina Fenlon
Title: Interactivity, Distributed Workflows, and Thick Provenance: A Review of Challenges Confronting Digital Humanities Research Objects
Submission: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3268809
Submitted as: RO2019 article
Decision: ACCEPT paper (accepted for proceeding and oral presentation)

Review 1

Reviewer: Frederik Coppens https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6565-5145

Quality of Writing

Is the text easy to follow? Are core concepts defined or referenced? Is it clear what is the author’s contribution?

good

The paper is structured clearly. The reasoning can be followed also by non-domain experts, although in some places a bit more context on humanities specific concepts might provide an improvement.

Research Object / Zenodo

URL for a Research Object or Zenodo record provided? Guidelines followed? Open format (e.g. HTML)? Sufficient metadata, e.g. links to software? Some form of Data Package provided? Add text below if you need to clarify your score.

basic (e.g. Zenodo with PDF and minimal metadata)

(not sure what entails ‘detailed metadata’)

Overall evaluation

Please provide a brief review, including a justification for your scores. Both score and review text are required.

This paper identifies three challenges for the humanities field to adopt the RO model. Building on the strengths of the RO model (aggregation, semantic description, linked data) the author exemplifies the specific limitations that require addressing to allow for uptake in the humanities community (interactivity, non-automatibility, thick provenance). This provides a good starting point to discuss between the humanities and RO communities to further develop the model to accommodate the needs of the humanities.

Review 2

Reviewer: (anonymous)

Quality of Writing

Is the text easy to follow? Are core concepts defined or referenced? Is it clear what is the author’s contribution?

(delete as appropriate)

good

The paper is well written and well organized.

Research Object / Zenodo

good (followed guidelines, demonstrating own format, related resources included, but some details missing)

The paper is on Zenodo. There is no specific dataset to package. References are given (though wouldn’t it be nice to have links to the specific passages! :-))

Overall evaluation

Please provide a brief review, including a justification for your scores. Both score and review text are required.

This paper highlights three challenges in adapting/extending the Research Object model/implementations to support humanities research. The paper highlights the use of interactive resources as data sources/analysis tools, scholarly workflow that is broader than a computational workflow, and the need to annotate a wide range of objects beyond datasets (from passages in text, to interpretations and evidence, to provenance itself). The author clearly defines these challenges and provides examples that give them context.

Overall, I think the paper would spur interesting discussion at the workshop. (I would argue that the cited challenges actually exist in other disciplines, and the issue is more one of emphasis/centrality. This is not a criticism of the paper, but an argument that it actually has broader relevance than the author claims and should be of interest to attendees due to its relevance in their disciplines.)

The paper discusses several applications/systems that are designed to support humanities research. While it may be out of scope for the paper, I think it would be interesting to also compare with RO-related systems such as Dataverse and Clowder (and others) which allow arbitrary metadata and generate zipped OAI-ORE/BagIT outputs.

The paper argues some that it is a lack of support for relevant vocabularies that is an issue. How much of the challenges does configurable/dynamically extensible metadata solve/enable progress on? What else is needed? (One issue

I see is that RO tools in general don’t treat anything except files (and datasets containing files) as first-class objects that can be created, given identifiers, annotated, etc. Would the addition of such a generic capability help / support more rapid development of the specific vocabularies and objects required to support the humanities?)

FWIW: I see my questions in the previous paragraphs more as an example of the type of discussion that this paper could raise at the workshop rather than something the paper should be changes to address - I think it is ‘acceptable’ as is.

Also FWIW: I like that the paper distinguishes between the RO model, which is generic enough to support ‘everything’ and most RO implementations which focus primarily on computational workflow (at least automated workflow of some kind). It’s a wonderful reminder that, while technologists often sell concepts, it’s the implementations that get used.