Digital humanities as a cross‐disciplinary battleground: An examination of inscriptions in journal publications

Abstract

Inscriptions are defined as traces of scientific research production that are embodied in material artifacts and media, which encompass a wide variety of nonverbal forms such as graphs, diagrams, and tables. Inscription serves as a fundamental rhetorical device in research outputs and practices. As many inscriptions are deeply rooted in a scientific research paradigm, they can be used to evaluate the level of scientificity of a scientific field. This is specifically helpful to understand the relationships between research traditions in digital humanities (DH), a highly cross‐disciplinary between various humanities and scientific traditions. This paper presents a quantitative, community‐focused examination of how inscriptions are used in English‐language research articles in DH journals. We randomly selected 252 articles published between 2011 and 2020 from a representative DH journal list, and manually classified the inscriptions and author domains in these publications. We found that inscriptions have been increasingly used during the past decade, and their uses are more intensive in publications led by STEM authors comparing to other domains. This study offers a timely survey of the disciplinary landscape of DH from the perspective of inscriptions and sheds light on how different research approaches collaborate and combat in the field of DH.

Communicating Uncertainty in Digital Humanities Visualization Research

“…Benito-Santos and Therón Sánchez [9] deployed a data-driven approach and focused on a bibliographic analysis of the research community focusing on the collaboration networks among authors and the publication topics. Also focusing on collaborations, Ma and Li [84] reviewed the various inscriptions that digital humanities use, including data visualizations. They found that inscription-use seems to be driven by the increase of interdisciplinary collaborations among humanists and STEM researchers.…”

Evaluating the Value of Exploratory Tools in Digital Humanities Collections and Scholarly Projects: Discussions from Researchers, Developers, and Users’ Perspectives

“…More specifically, exploratory tools that facilitate interactive discovery, analysis, or visualization, have been widely deployed in digital collections and projects as an essential feature to support indepth, creative interaction with the digital materials. Such exploratory tools in the context of digital humanities collections and projects can include, for example, visual analytic applications that allow users to explore the collection data broadly in the interface by means of visualization, or analytic applications embedded in interfaces that empower users to critically engage with the resources, performing interpretative activities of data, and sharing analysis and results via different scholarly communication channels (Gibbs and Owens, 2012;McCurdy et al, 2016;Jänicke et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2019;Chen & Cole, 2021;Ma, 2021).…”

Revisiting Connotations of Digital Humanists: Exploratory Interviews

“…Recent research in the landscape of DH illustrated that "DH is simultaneously a discipline in its own right and a highly interdisciplinary field, with many connecting factors to neighboring disciplines-first and foremost, computational linguistics, and information science" (Luhmann & Burghardt, 2022). In addition to the roles of DH among academic fields, Ma and Li (2022) also demonstrated that humanities and STEM researchers, among others, further shape the DH community with their respective, sometimes competing, research conventions as well as cross-field research collaborations. Empirical works focusing on DH intellectual structures, disciplinary compositions, and collaboration also suggest an increasingly complex picture of DH workforce (Antonijević, 2015;Fiormonte et al, 2015;Griffin & Hayler, 2018;Papadopoulos & Reilly, 2020).…”