Towards Multilingually Enabled Digital Knowledge Infrastructures: A Qualitative Survey Analysis

This chapter presents the results of a survey designed to identify the requirements for multilingually enabled digital knowledge infrastructures (KIs) with a particular focus on non-Latin scripts (NLS). Building on work carried out at the Disrupting Digital Monolingualism workshop at King’s College London in 2020, the authors argue that multilingual workflows are more complex than previously realised by digital humanists and that the conditions for improving them require a set of formalisable requirements, particularly for non-Latin script languages, although we do not yet share a common language with infrastructure specialists to articulate all of these requirements. The authors discuss their empirical study on multilingual practices in digital humanities, provide an overview of some of the major findings of their survey data, and suggest a pragmatic approach for designing language/language group-specific ‘requirement profiles’, that is, some core functional specifications that can be applied to digital infrastructures and in so doing improve multilingual awareness, skillsets, and professional development.