The CLARIAH Media Suite: a Hybrid Approach to System Design in the Humanities

The practices of digital humanists are evolving, highly diversified and experimental. There is also a lack of agreement about whether or not digital humanists should have data and programming skills. Thus, their underlying needs for higher levels of flexibility and transparency may be contradicted by their explicit requests for user-friendly graphic user interfaces (GUIs), creating challenges for designing information systems in the digital humanities. This paper describes the experience of designing the Media Suite, which provides access to important Dutch audiovisual collections and is part of the Dutch infrastructure for digital humanities. We outline a solution to the conflicting needs of scholars, by combining a semi-traditional GUI with Jupyter Notebooks. This solution tackles the needs of both novice and advanced users in digital research methods in the humanities. This demonstration paper explains how the Media Suite and the Jupyter notebooks work together, and elaborates on the rationale behind the design choices. We also outline the implications this hybrid and extensible approach has for interface design for the information science and scholarly community.