Generic tools and individual research needs in the Digital Humanities – Can agile development help?

Abstract

Many Digital Humanities research projects from many different target disciplines regularly encounter the same recurring key problems and key procedures such as preprocessing, standard text analytics, and visualization, which would be very time consuming if conducted without DH tools. This calls for the use of generic platforms. However, there is a trade-off, since different researchers from many different disciplines look at their objects from different theoretical perspectives. This raises the general question how we can deal with this very typical conflict, and whether agile development might be a suitable development method to cope with it. By addressing this question, we report on an experience during a DH summer school as a condensed experiment in dealing with this trade-off using the iLCM as a generic platform. In summary, although we have not arrived at a procedural solutions for balancing individual user needs and generic problems which call for generic tools, our summer academy experience well illustrates the high potential of a software eco-system supporting the approach of agile development in Digital Humanities, and may help to better understand the role of generic software tools and their role in DH.