A Design Methodology for Web-based Sound Archives
Annie Murray, Jared Wiercinski · Digital humanities quarterly · 2014
Well-designed digital tools facilitate the creation of new knowledge in the humanities. Good design is user-centered, focused, and needs-driven, all of which depend on a rich understanding of the target audience or end user. Unsworth’s scholarly primitives and the work of Palmer, Teffeau and Pirmann on scholarly information practices provide a framework for understanding how humanities scholars do their work. We propose applying this framework to the design of a spoken word archive, with the aim of designing a digital tool that is optimized for the documented practices of scholars. We propose that listening and annotation are key activities of humanities scholars performing literary criticism of audio recordings. Taking the SpokenWeb poetry project as an example, we discuss how designing a web-based tool with these key activities in mind could facilitate close and critical engagement with recordings of spoken poetry. We present a methodology for designing a web-based sound archive for literary criticism and we propose features and functionalities that facilitate this criticism.