Scholarly primitives
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There is a lot of variation between different academic disciplines. This makes it a challenge to find anything that, say, an astrophysicist and someone studying Jane Austen may have in common (apart from being academics). But there are some core, underlying activities that all academics do have in common (though realised differently in different subjects). These have been called scholarly primitives. They are "primitive" in the sense of being basic or underlying.
In 2000 John Unsworth sought to identify a basic set of tasks that all humanities scholars might share.[1]
His list of such features are
- Discovering
- Annotating
- Comparing
- Referring
- Sampling
- Illustrating
- Representing
This has been widely discussed and cited. For example, Google scholar gave more than 800 hits for "scholarly primitives" in late Oct 2025. Some of the key places the idea has been discussed are Schreibman, Siemens and Unsworth, eds. 2016. A New Companion to Digital Humanities.[2]
John Unsworth, later (2012) discussed the idea with Charlotte Tupman.[3]
See also Wouter Kaltenbrunner, 2015, "Reflexive inertia: reinventing scholarship through digital practices"[4]
Willard McCarty has discussed the idea (2005).[5] as well as in an earlier article McCarty (2002) [6]
In one follow up discussion Palmer et al. 2009 define five scholarly primitives:[7]
- searching,
- collecting,
- reading,
- writing
- collaborating
for all academic research and for the humanities in general some others:
- browsing
- collecting,
- note taking
identified as key component activities of everyday work.
References
- ↑ Unsworth, John (May 13, 2000). Scholarly Primitives: what methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this?. Symposium on "Humanities Computing: Formal Methods, Experimental Practice". King's College, London. Archived from the original on May 11, 2025. Retrieved 2025-10-28.
- ↑ Schreibman, Susan; Siemens, Ray; Unsworth, John (2016). Schreibman, Susan; Siemens, Ray; Unsworth, John, eds. A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Search this book on
- ↑
Unsworth, John; Tupman, Charlotte (2012). "Interview with John Unsworth, April 2011, carried out and transcribed by Charlotte Tupman". In Deegan, Marilyn; McCarty, Willard. Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities. London: Ashgate. Search this book on
- ↑ Kaltenbrunner, Wouter (May 27, 2015). "Reflexive inertia: reinventing scholarship through digital practices". Leiden University Repository. hdl:1887/33061. Retrieved 2025-10-28.
- ↑ McCarty, Willard (2005). "2". Humanities Computing. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Search this book on
- ↑ McCarty, Willard (2002). "Humanities Computing: Essential Problems, Experimental Practice". Literary and Linguistic Computing. 17 (1): 103–125. doi:10.1093/llc/17.1.103.
- ↑ Palmer, Carole L.; Teffeau, Lauren C.; Pirmann, Carrie M. (2009). Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development (PDF) (Report). OCLC Research. Retrieved 2025-10-28.
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