Cosima Wagner
Freie Universität Berlin. Liaison Librarian for East Asian Studies
Strengthening multilingually enabled knowledge infrastructures for Japanese studies researchers and resource specialists in Europe – Introducing a user persona approach
The digital transformation of scholarship has brought access to a steadily increasing quantity of digitized Japanese resources for European Japanese Studies researchers – not the least thanks to the ardent activities and services of libraries both in Japan and Europe. What is more, digital humanities research methods are also gaining momentum in Japanese Studies. However, when it comes to institutional knowledge infrastructures at universities in Europe, it is still a shared experience that they can fall short in accommodating the required linguistic and geo-cultural diversity, especially regarding data and tools (software) in non-Latin scripts like Japanese. In order to raise awareness about the needs of digital scholarship in area studies disciplines, recent activities initiated by an international network of researchers and librarians have emphasized the need for linguistically more inclusive digital infrastructure development to better support multilingual (DH) scholarly activities in a global context.
The talk introduces the results of a data-driven “multilingual DH persona” creation process which was based on the concept of user profiles in UX design. The personas illustrate the needs and challenges of multilingual DH practitioners and can be used as a starting point for compiling a requirement list for multilingually enhanced knowledge infrastructures for (digital) Japanese studies. With this, the presentation also aims at continuing last year’s conference discussion about “how EAJRS libraries and librarians can collaborate in order to co-design more sustainable, multilingual, geo-cultural diverse knowledge infrastructures for (digital) scholarship in Japanese Studies” (Koizumi/Wagner 2024).