This article introduces a frame of reference for understanding the fundamental challenges that inform digital humanities as an interdisciplinary research area between arts, humanities, information, and computer science. Its conclusions are based upon the evidence base developed within an EU-funded collaboration known as Knowledge Complexity, or KPLEX for short (www.kplex-project.eu), in particular via the project’s thirty-eight linked interviews about big data research. When viewed from the perspective of the digital humanities, five distinct points of ‘aporia’ with a significant impact on digital humanities (DH) appear in this corpus, places where the interviewees explicitly or tacitly expose gulfs between the epistemic cultures that contribute to DH and that create tensions between these disciplines, even as they seek to collaborate. This article will explore these areas of apparent irreconcilability, and conclude with a series of reflections on how digital humanities researchers might build upon their unique competency profile to negotiate within these critical conversations, in particular in the framework of the emerging subfield of critical digital humanities.

Although there has been an increased uptake of technology-based outputs and methods in humanities research, substantial barriers remain to the full realization of potential benefits in this area. Some of these barriers resonate with the most basic challenges defined by the field of Human–Computer Interaction, including the move from computational to faciliatory computing, non-user-centred industrial design of research tools, the application of inappropriate experience models by users, and a cultural mismatch between researchers and technicians. This article develops a model of digital development in the humanities as a ‘value chain’, along which critical gaps appear when the only actors in the chain are the researcher and the technical support staff. Having identified these gaps, the article then goes on to suggest ways in which a dedicated Digital Humanities Intermediary (DHI) is able to provide much needed skills and support of a non-specifically technical nature at critical moments in the projects' development. This kind of intermediary can be instrumental in increasing technology use among humanities research staff, providing a wide range of technical knowledge and other support functions to the relevant faculties in a form that fits well with their own language and preferred ways of working. The success of the position is dependant on solid networks and the enlightened support of the University, however, as it is still very much at the stage of reacting and capitalizing on opportunities as they are encountered, rather than simply slotting in to a stable, static, proven structure.

The capture, modelling and visualisation of uncertainty has become a hot topic in many areas of science, such as the digital humanities (DH). Fuelled by critical voices among the DH community, DH scholars are becoming more aware of the intrinsic advantages that incorporating the notion of uncertainty into their workflows may bring. Additionally, the increasing availability of ubiquitous, web-based technologies has given rise to many collaborative tools that aim to support DH scholars in performing remote work alongside distant peers from other parts of the world. In this context, this paper describes two user studies seeking to evaluate a taxonomy of textual uncertainty aimed at enabling remote collaborations on digital humanities (DH) research objects in a digital medium. Our study focuses on the task of free annotation of uncertainty in texts in two different scenarios, seeking to establish the requirements of the underlying data and uncertainty models that would be needed to implement a hypothetical collaborative annotation system (CAS) that uses information visualisation and visual analytics techniques to leverage the cognitive effort implied by these tasks. To identify user needs and other requirements, we held two user-driven design experiences with DH experts and lay users, focusing on the annotation of uncertainty in historical recipes and literary texts. The lessons learned from these experiments are gathered in a series of insights and observations on how these different user groups collaborated to adapt an uncertainty taxonomy to solve the proposed exercises. Furthermore, we extract a series of recommendations and future lines of work that we share with the community in an attempt to establish a common agenda of DH research that focuses on collaboration around the idea of uncertainty.

In its widest sense, infrastructure allows us as finite individuals to achieve beyond our individual capacity to know, to do, to see. But even within the narrower context of research infrastructures, broad and diverse definitions exist of how such an infrastructure should deliver these enhancements in knowledge and perspective. The Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archival Research Infrastructure (CENDARI) project was launched in 2012 to address some of the gaps in provision for digital historical research, building on a long tradition of work in libraries, archives, digital humanities research centres and other research infrastructures. What distinguishes CENDARI, however, is its focus on what the project team has identified as the ‘grand challenges’ for each of its contributing stakeholder groups: collections experts based in libraries and archives, historians of the medieval and modern periods, and e-Scientists. This ethos, combined with its close relationship at European level to DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, has instigated a unique and fruitful approach to supporting historical research with digital resources, tools and spaces.

This paper takes a high-level view of both the sources and status of uncertainty in historical research and the manners in which possible negative effects of this omnipresent characteristic might be managed and mitigated. It draws upon both the experience of a number of digital projects and research into the many-faceted concept of uncertainty in data, and in particular, it explores the conflicting strategies for the management of uncertainty in historical research processes that are reflected in the historiographical and digital humanities literature. Its intention is to support a dialogue between the humanities and computer science, able to realise the promise of digital humanities without a reversion to a new positivism in disciplines such as history and literary studies and it therefore concludes with recommendations for the developers of research tools and environments for digital history.