In the Loop: Smiljana Antonijević

Designing Digital Research Tools

Scholarly work across disciplines is increasingly digital, prompting transformations of research practices, assumptions, and methods. A design challenge that stands out in this encounter between academic knowledge production and digital technologies is designing digital research tools. Drawing on results of a three-year ethnographic study, this presentation discusses the following questions:
 

• What are the challenges of designing digital research tools as epistemic tools?


• What are the preferred features of digital research tools?


• What kind of influence do scholars have on design of digital research tools?

This study was conducted in twenty-three academic institutions in Europe and the US as part of the research projects of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Oxford Internet Institute, and Penn State University. Through case studies, surveys, observations, and in-depth interviews with researchers, graduate students, program leaders, librarians, IT engineers, policy makers, and funders, the study provided insights into epistemological, methodological, technical, educational, organizational, and other key issues in contemporary digital scholarship.

Smiljana Antonijević is an associate researcher at eHumanities Group of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Andrew W. Mellon research anthropologist at Penn State University. In the academic year 2013-14, she is a visiting researcher at IIT Institute of Design. Smiljana’s research brings ethnographic methods and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to the study of digital scholarship, affective computing, embodiment in virtual environments, and other subjects in the field of digital culture. Her forthcoming book, Amongst Digital Humanists: An ethnographic study of digital knowledge production, will appear in the winter of 2014. Smiljana holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Communication, and Internet Studies from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.