To support researchers in questions on Research Data Management (RDM), a lot of universities have established centers that offer RDM counseling services. For aligning these services with the RDM requirements of their target groups, many of these centers have conducted quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews. Unfortunately, these methods are not entirely appropriate to analyze RDM requirements. This blind spot in RDM research was addressed in my PhD dissertation, which resulted in a formal description model for RDM requirements in the Humanities, their conditions, workflows and solutions as well as in an analyis of such model on a content level. The model consists of a hierarchical system of categories developed on the basis of a corpus of anonymized RDM counseling protocols. In my talk, I will present the formal system of categories, which have come to constitute a conceptual language for RDM emerging from actual praxis in the field, and the profiles of RDM requirements which resulted from the content analysis.

Modelling is a central activity in digital humanities, theoretically as well as practically. Meta-modelling is a well understood activity in computer science, but has been less explored in the humanities. In the proposed paper, some of the possible functions of meta-modelling will be pointed out, with a specific focus on how a meta-models can contextualise and extend the meaning of a model.

Meta-models are models of models. In the paper, we will show how meta-models can be an integrated part of the information being negotiated and conveyed by a model, complementing, clarifying, and contextualising it.

Using CIDOC CRM and TEI as examples, the proposed paper will discuss the role of meta-modelling in the establishment of meaning and context in modelling processes; in the use of models as well as in the creation of them. The cyclical aspects of this process will be highlighted, emphasising how the creation and use of meta-models always have both top-down and bottom-up aspects, but that the importance of both and how they are implemented in specific use cases can vary significantly.

The humanities have long depended upon the page as a temporal instrument through which meaning unfolds in ordered adjacency. Sequential arrangement stabilizes causality: an event follows another and therefore explains it. Even in digitized environments this logic persists, as interfaces reproduce pagination through PDFs, encoded page breaks, and bounded reading units. Alongside these transitional forms emerge machine readable textual structures such as datasets, metadata tables, filtered archives, and search based retrievals that do not provide a privileged entry point. Here the reader does not encounter a past arranged in advance but assembles one through navigation. This paper argues that such environments generate navigational time, a temporality organized through selection and proximity rather than sequence, transforming historical interpretation from reconstruction into configuration.

The paper will develop this claim through a computational experiment based on archival materials concerning Anagarika Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi Society. The same corpus of documents will be structured into a choice based interactive interface in which readers traverse the archive through selectable nodes instead of chronological order. Different pathways produce incompatible historical explanations: contextual events appearing before or after a document alter the perceived intention of the actor without altering the document itself. The experiment will demonstrate that once pagination disappears, causal authority shifts from authorial arrangement to readerly traversal.

By theorizing navigational time, the paper will contribute to digital humanities debates on data modelling, interface design, and interpretive ethics. It will show that computational infrastructures do not merely store knowledge but condition its intelligibility, producing multiple potential histories within a single dataset and revealing history as assembled rather than sequential.