Draft:Scholarly primitives
 | Review waiting, please be patient.
This may take 5 weeks or more, since drafts are reviewed in no specific order. There are 806 pending submissions waiting for review.
Where to get help
How to improve a draft
You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Editor resources
Reviewer tools
|
 | This is a draft article. It is a work in progress open to editing by anyone. Please ensure core content policies are met before publishing it as a live Wikipedia article. Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL Last edited by Dz3 (talk | contribs) 22 days ago. (Update)
This draft has been submitted and is currently awaiting review. |
The term was coined in 2000 when John Unsworth sought to identify a basic set of tasks that all humanities scholars might share as the basis for 'manageable but also useful tool-building enterprise in humanities computing'. For example, scholars in many humanities disciplines want to compare items of analysis, 'whether those objects are texts, images, films, or any other species of human production'.[3]
His original list of primitives was:
- discovering
- annotating
- comparing
- referring
- sampling
- illustrating
- representing
Since then, Unsworth's original primitives have been widely used and updated.[4]
Some of the key places the idea has been discussed are Schreibman, Siemens and Unsworth A New Companion to Digital Humanities (2016).[5]
John Unsworth, later (2012) discussed the idea in discussion with Charlotte Tupman.[6] See also Wouter Kaltenbrunner, 2015, "Reflexive inertia: reinventing scholarship through digital practices".[7] Willard McCarty has also discussed the idea in 2002[8] and then also in 2005.[9]
Later work by Carole Palmer, Lauren Teffeau and Carrie Pirmann (2009) defined five scholarly primitives for all academic research as:[10]
- searching
- collecting
- reading
- writing
- collaborating
plus some others for the humanities in general:
- browsing
- collecting
- note taking
identified as key component activities of everyday academic work. Palmer et al. say "The notion of the primitive is distinct in that it is meant to refer to activities that are common across disciplines, at least within the humanities where the concept was originally developed and applied, and the examples provided by Unsworth suggest that the activities are relatively discrete in nature. In our application, we refine the concept further by emphasizing a sense of the primitive as something at the base or beginning of a larger process" p.7.
References
[edit]- ^ Hennicke, Steffen; Gradmann, Stefan; Dill, Kristin; Tschumpel, Gerold; Thoden, Klaus; Morbindoni, Christian; Pichler, Alois. "D3.4 – Research Report on DH Scholarly Primitives" (PDF). Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana. Europeana. Retrieved 10 November 2025.
- ^ Palmer, Carole L.; Teffeau, Lauren C.; Pirmann, Carrie M. (2009). Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development (PDF) (Report). OCLC Research. Retrieved 2025-10-28.
- ^ Unsworth, John (May 13, 2000). Scholarly Primitives: what methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this?. Symposium on "Humanities Computing: Formal Methods, Experimental Practice". King's College, London. Archived from the original on May 11, 2025. Retrieved 2025-10-28.
- ^ Schreibman, Susan; Gradmann, Stefan; Hennicke, Steffen; Blanke, Tobias; Chambers, Sally; Dunning, Alastair; Gray, Jonathan; Lauer, Gerhard; Pichler, Alois; Renn, Jürgen; Morbidoni, Christian; Romary, Laurent; Sasaki, Felix; Warwick, Claire (16 July 2013). "Beyond Infrastructure -- Modelling Scholarly Research and Collaboration". Digital Humanities 2013. Retrieved 10 November 2025.
- ^ Schreibman, Susan; Siemens, Ray; Unsworth, John (2016). Schreibman, Susan; Siemens, Ray; Unsworth, John (eds.). A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
- ^ Unsworth, John; Tupman, Charlotte (2012). "Interview with John Unsworth, April 2011, carried out and transcribed by Charlotte Tupman". In Deegan, Marilyn; McCarty, Willard (eds.). Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities. London: Ashgate.
- ^ Kaltenbrunner, Wouter (May 27, 2015). "Reflexive inertia: reinventing scholarship through digital practices". Leiden University Repository. hdl:1887/33061. Retrieved 2025-10-28.
- ^ McCarty, Willard (2002). "Humanities Computing: Essential Problems, Experimental Practice". Literary and Linguistic Computing. 17 (1): 103–125. doi:10.1093/llc/17.1.103.
- ^ McCarty, Willard (2005). "2". Humanities Computing. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- ^ Palmer, Carole L.; Teffeau, Lauren C.; Pirmann, Carrie M. (2009). Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development (PDF) (Report). OCLC Research. Retrieved 2025-10-28.