Building Digital Archives with Curation-Research-Driven Approaches

In curating datasets, the focus within digital humanities still is on archival perspectives. We instead suggest to combine curation with research-driven approaches, taking into account research questions that are answered with the data digitized and indexed. This is showcased with a research project on everyday culture surrounding community function halls with restaurants, being central establishments for rural communities in past and present times. The project curates research data. It links five heterogeneous collections revealing their complexity through the contexts that connect individual datasets. A research-driven approach combines this digitization and indexing with the collection and analysis of the underlying meanings and perspectives of the actors as supplementary information through ethnographic methods (Faubion/Marcus 2009). Enriched with this knowledge as metadata, the datasets become open data with the corresponding contextual findings. The incorporation of ethnographic research-driven contextualization with innovative digital technologies of recording, modeling, archiving, and presenting such multi-faceted phenomena aims to adequately convey cultural-historical and contemporary complexity. Qualitative approaches can therefore be used to support the various interconnections as well as disparities.