Tool Design as Digital Humanities Research

Many researchers in a wide variety of disciplines outside of computer science are developing software tools as part of their research agenda. The current academic-publishing climate often then requires researchers to publish separate articles on their software tools, treating the tools as byproducts rather than primary research outputs. This presentation introduces Design Based History Research (DBHR) as a methodological bridge between the practices of digital-history tool design, the use of digital methods to create historical argumentation, and social-science-inspired methodological innovation. Design Based Research (DBR) is an approach to studying learning theory that asks researchers to integrate a theory into a design, implement the design, and then study the design as a way of modifying both the theory and the design that aims to reify it. DBHR is an adaptation of the DBR approach that seeks to center software tools as a primary research product by offering a template for research that is rooted in the concurrent and intertwined development of historical theory, digital-history tools, and collaborative historical methods.