Draft:Scholarly primitives
academic research principles
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Scholarly primitives, seek to identify core, underlying aspects or activities that occur in all academic research regardless of discipline. Originally pitched as the 'most generic and principal parts of any research process in the humanities', they were introduced as an important concept in the digital humanities.[1] Since then, the idea has been generalised to apply to all academic disciplines.[2]
Submission declined on 8 March 2026 by Theroadislong (talk).
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| Submission declined on 8 February 2026 by ScalarFactor (talk). This draft reads like an essay or opinion piece. Wikipedia is not a place for original research or personal opinions. The draft should:
Declined by ScalarFactor 42 days ago.
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| Submission declined on 14 December 2025 by ChrysGalley (talk). This draft is not written from a neutral point of view. Wikipedia articles must be written neutrally in a formal, impersonal, and dispassionate way. They should not read like a blog post, advertisement, or fan page. Rewrite the draft to remove:
Declined by ChrysGalley 3 months ago.
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Comment: The background/intro section is not required at all. That's not how Wikipedia articles are written. Theroadislong (talk) 12:01, 8 March 2026 (UTC)
- Comment: This article is going to be notable, and there is sourcing, so that is the main hurdle met. However it's not written in an encyclopedic style, with just listings and very little context. Unsworth own source was easier to understand, however that source, and source 2 have been heavily lifted into the article, such that it almost looks LLM constructed. The good news is that it should not take too much effort to get this draft promoted into mainspace, but it needs some rewording and use of sections. See shorter articles with say B level Content Assessment as a general target here. ChrysGalley (talk) 14:39, 14 December 2025 (UTC)
 | This is a draft article. It is a work in progress open to editing by anyone. Please ensure core content policies are met before publishing it as a live Wikipedia article. Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL Last edited by Theroadislong (talk | contribs) 14 days ago. (Update)
Finished drafting? |
The term was coined in 2000 when John Unsworth sought to identify a basic set of tasks that all humanities scholars might share as the basis for 'manageable but also useful tool-building enterprise in humanities computing'. For example, scholars in many humanities disciplines want to compare items of analysis, 'whether those objects are texts, images, films, or any other species of human production'.[3]
His original list of primitives was:
- discovering
- annotating
- comparing
- referring
- sampling
- illustrating
- representing
Since then, Unsworth's original primitives have been widely used and updated.[4]
Some of the key places the idea has been discussed are Schreibman, Siemens and Unsworth A New Companion to Digital Humanities (2016).[5]
John Unsworth, later (2012) discussed the idea in discussion with Charlotte Tupman.[6] See also Wouter Kaltenbrunner, 2015, "Reflexive inertia: reinventing scholarship through digital practices".[7] Willard McCarty has also discussed the idea in 2002[8] and then also in 2005.[9]
Later work by Carole Palmer, Lauren Teffeau and Carrie Pirmann (2009) defined five scholarly primitives for all academic research as:[10]
- searching
- collecting
- reading
- writing
- collaborating
plus some others for the humanities in general:
- browsing
- collecting
- note taking.
These were identified as key component activities of everyday academic work. Palmer et al. say "The notion of the primitive is distinct in that it is meant to refer to activities that are common across disciplines, at least within the humanities where the concept was originally developed and applied, and the examples provided by Unsworth suggest that the activities are relatively discrete in nature. In our application, we refine the concept further by emphasizing a sense of the primitive as something at the base or beginning of a larger process" p.7.
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Instead, only summarize in your own words a range of independent, reliable, published sources that discuss the subject.