Research infrastructures are gaining increased significance across all fields of science. In the humanities, however, there is still some uncertainty about what these infrastructures actually involve and what tasks they should perform. A helpful way of looking at this is to see them partly as mechanisms for scaling up research frameworks originally created by smaller groups for their own specialized work—often in the form of “tools”—which later prove useful to a wider scholarly audience. Yet simply having these tools in place is not enough, especially when users come from very different methodological and disciplinary backgrounds. Effective research infrastructures act as intermediaries, disseminating and adapting such tools so a broader community can employ them more productively. While one measure of success in this ecosystem might be downloads or user counts, we have to ask: is that enough? Does popularity actually entail usefulness for serious scholarship?
In our COMHIS group, we realised some time ago that a framework we had created to study reception in our own research could also benefit more traditionally oriented intellectual historians. Accordingly, we developed the Reception Reader (https://receptionreader.com/) with DARIAH-FI (https://www.dariah.fi/), a research infrastructure based in Finland. From our perspective, building a tool like the Reception Reader is somewhat comparable to publishing a monograph. Success here is not solely about user counts or citation indices; rather, it is also about broader use and validation—akin to a monograph securing reviews in reputable journals. In many humanities fields, citations alone are not the defining benchmark, especially where the community is small but the scholarship is serious. Perhaps in the context of research infrastructures, and different tool building activities, we can take a cue from this practice and look beyond crude usage statistics, focusing as well on how often our tools are examined or critically reviewed—an approach that might be more aligned with how intellectual value is typically recognised in these domains. And perhaps the most significant measure is what new research and projects emerge from these tools, as seen in funded grants or published articles that make active use of them.
I am pleased to note that we have received precisely this kind of recognition: a review article by Róbert Péter in Global Intellectual History (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23801883.2025.2474486?src=#d1e97). It shows how a tool originally conceived for a computational research context can resonate with traditional humanities audiences—exactly what we hope humanities research infrastructures will foster. For anyone unfamiliar with the tool, it is a large-scale textual overlap detection framework for studying reception in early modern Britain, spanning hundreds of thousands of works. The underlying approach, initially devised by TurkuNLP based on BLAST, was adapted by the Helsinki Computational History Group and integrated into the Reception Reader interface through collaboration with the Finnish research infrastructure DARIAH-FI.