Workshop with researchers at DHKO
Table of Contents
The WebData project aims to develop infrastructure in close dialogue with the research community. To gain a better understanding of the requirements for the data platform and the services we will develop, it is important for us to map the needs and desires of scholars. Therefore, we are conducting a needs assessment that includes workshops, interviews, and a survey.
The work on assessing scholarly needs began during the DHKO conference in Hamar on October 15-16, 2025. Here, we gathered 15 researchers from the digital humanities for a workshop, mapping and discussing their needs for access, interfaces, data, and metadata.
The Workshop
The workshop confirmed some of what we already know from many in the research community: there is significant interest for access to data from the National Library’s web archive.
The participants came from seven different universities and colleges, and work within a range of disciplines: media studies, computer science, library studies, linguistics, interaction design, history, human-computer interaction, cultural studies, and musicology.
In the first session, participants were asked to respond individually to questions about what they wanted from the research infrastructure within four different themes:
- Access
- Interfaces and basic functionality
- Data and metadata
- Tools and methods
In the second session, we went through the responses in plenary and discussed their responses in plenary. It was a good and constructive conversation, with many valuable inputs on functionality and desires for enriched metadata. In addition, some viewpoints were nuanced and elaborated, which are not always easy to interpret from survey responses alone. Thus, the workshop added value in regards to assessing the quality of the survey questions and how responses can be interpreted.
Next Steps for the Needs Assessment
The workshop at DHKO was an important first step in assessing scholarly needs in the WebData project. A new workshop will be held during Digital Scholarship Days 2026 at the University of Oslo. In addition to these workshops, we will conduct in-depth interviews with researchers and collect responses to a survey that will be launched in November. This will give us an even better understanding of the needs and desires that exist.
The results from the needs assessment will lead to recommendations for the further development of the research infrastructure.
About the WebData Project
The WebData project is led by the National Library of Norway (NB), with the Norwegian Computing Center (NR), the University of Oslo (UiO), and the Arctic University of Norway (UiT) as partners. The Research Council of Norway (NFR) supports the project with funding.