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• Published: 02 January 2024

Making and interpreting: digital humanities as embodied action

• Zhiqing Zhang 1 ,
• Wanyi Song 2 &
• Peng Liu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5087-2112 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  13 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Complex networks
• Cultural and media studies

Digital technology has created new spaces, new realities and new ways of life, which have changed the way people perceive and recognise the world. In particular, the production, dissemination and reception methods of literature and art have been impacted upon significantly. Acknowledging humanities scholars have been engaged in conducting research while theorising and debating what Digital Humanities (DH) is/is not in the past two decades, this study extends current thought on DH by connecting it with the concept of sociological body, particularly thinking bodily interaction in relation to digital technologies in DH practice. The increasingly deepening integration of body and technology allows DH practice to become an event, in which embodied bodily action is situated in the (digital) environment that impacts on knowledge production. Acknowledging contemporary discourse regarding the two waves of DH, the article pays attention to the presence of the body whereby DH practice is bodily inclusive as mediated by digital technology, in which bodily interaction in producing knowledge via technologies reflects haptic experience and cultural constraints upon the sociological body. At the same time, technologies are not an innocent medium but an active contributor, so much so that we claim knowledge produced with the substantial involvement of digital technology is ‘digitised’ knowledge, as our critical interpretation towards a possible DH 3.0 practice that is subject to the core value of the humanities.

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Introduction

Embracing the current academic tide that favours interdisciplinary research as a means to break boundaries and achieve the integration of disciplines, Harpham ( 2006 ), the former director of the National Humanities Center in U.S., notes that questions formerly reserved for the humanities are being approached by scientists in various disciplines, such as cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, artificial life, and behavioural genetics. Acknowledging digital technologies have energised humanities research, the emerging field of Digital Humanities (DH) is a response to the transformation of humanities in the digital age. It is worthwhile reminding ourselves that the essential problem of humanity in a computerised age remains the same as it has always been; that is, the problem of not solely how to be more productive, more comfortable, more content, but also how to be more sensitive, more proportionate, more alive (Cousins, 1966 ). DH has interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary attributes since its inception, Footnote 1 even though the very definition of DH is still being debated. This article draws on the concept of the sociological body in interdisciplinary terms by thinking bodily embodiment and haptic experience in relation to DH practice whereby the increasing integration of body and technology allows DH to be seen as an event; that is to say, as an embodied body in a digitally situated environment forming information and producing knowledge.

Digital Humanities, initially called Humanities Computing, is broadly humanities-based field involving scholars in the research areas of literary studies, history, media studies, musicology, and many other fields which benefitted from bringing computing technologies into the study of humanities materials. DH originated in the pursuit of more accurate objectivity and comprehensiveness in research beyond traditional methods in the humanities, such as McGann’s ( 2013 ) study on library research on how digital technologies can provide easier access to primary materials and increase the speed of searching and comparison. In cultural analytics, research can be conducted through the use of quantitative computational techniques which offer massive amounts of literary or visual data analysis (Manovich and Douglas, 2009 ), allowing for the visualisation of large amounts of data where patterns emerge. Acknowledging humanistic scholarship is either in the traditionalist mode of individual sensibility or in the contemporary mode of social critique, DH articulates a different understanding of the nature of meaning, which is “to speak to the larger patterns and deeper meanings of human experience…[and is] a modern technological incarnation” (Fuller, 2020 , 260, 262). The well-known example is the difference between distant readings versus close readings of texts in literary study (Moretti, 2013 ).

DH scholars are those who either adopt digital technologies in studying questions that are traditional to the humanities, or use values of traditional humanities in questioning digital technologies. Nevertheless, humanities research is increasingly being mediated through digital technology. Acknowledging efforts to theorise DH as a new discipline in which the debate on the boundary of DH is continuing and has not been settled over the past two decades, DH is intimate to humanities research, given the increasing number of research done in/via ‘charticles’, or journalistic articles that combine text, image, video, computational applications and interactivity in the humanities (Stickney, 2008 ). Kirschenbaum ( 2012 ) notes that various DH scholarly approaches reflect their interest in making in DH by, for example, creating digital archives, digital visualisation and possible new digital methods for (re)exploring social and cultural concerns. McGann notes that the main value of DH work resides in the creation, migration, or preservation of cultural materials ( 2008 , 2014 ). Meanwhile, other scholars emphasise interpretive work as a critical reflection, such as the interpretation of DH production in terms of its social and cultural impact. Although the digital approach can lead to a different understanding of large-scale cultural, social and political processes, it is actualised in concrete actions and reactions of operating digital technologies reflected as decision making on, and interpretation of, the inclusion/exclusion of data, for example. Thinking bodily interactions, humanities and digital technology altogether is to focus on the making in practice with the presence of body and haptic knowledge. In other words, technologies are not innocent; the knowledge produced with the substantial involvement of digital technology is ‘digitised’ knowledge, thereafter the bodily digital is formed.

While Manovich questions what culture is after it has been “softwarized” ( 2009 ), this article acknowledges, following Berry, that “understanding digital humanities is in some sense then understanding code, and this can be a resourceful way of understanding cultural production more generally” (2011, 5). In other words, the computer together with software is “the new engine of culture” (Manovich, 2013 , 21) and DH is where it takes effect. The article uses an interdisciplinary approach to think through the everyday use of digital technology in professional practice and research activity as an embodied act, in which one’s bodily action can be the critical interpretation in the process of knowledge making, such as bodily movement in manipulating digital technologies. Bodily making is critical interpretation. The mingling between physical and virtual space is ever strong, enabled and accelerated by the development of technology, such as immersive bodily experience by TeamLab. There is no longer a need to divide actual and virtual spaces, but rather take the body in action that is acting, reacting and crossing spaces constantly while knowledge is produced, in which ‘digitised’ embodiment and the bodily digital are formed. Rethinking DH via the concepts of situatedness and embodied bodily actions is to think DH practice as dynamic event, being in the world and beyond a discipline.

This article argues that DH practice is an embodied act in experiencing the impact of digital technology upon bodies, whereby new bodily knowledge, inclusive of the haptic and the visual, emerges in the process of action and reaction in collaboration with digital tools across actual and virtual space. The article, via analytical discussion, conceptualises and sees digital technology as not an innocent tool or neutral medium, but rather a series of concrete actions and reactions of bodily interactions with actuality and virtuality, where the knowledge co-produced is ‘digitised’ knowledge. The article, therefore, begins with a literature review that revisits the core value of traditional humanities, followed by stating the changes brought about by virtual reality, and then presents various concerns and some conceptual analysis of distinct and diverse aspects of scholarly works in the two waves of DH. The research method descripts the ensuing analytical discussion built on from previous works in terms of the concepts of situatedness and embodiment as a theoretical lens. The findings are elaborated on and theorised in the penultimate section conceptualising the bodily inclusive in DH practice by thinking bodily interaction, humanities, and digital technology altogether to produce ‘digitised’ knowledge via two case analyses.

Literature review

Criticalness–core value of humanities.

Criticalness, along with debate, pluralism and inquiry for instance, is the essence of the humanities, and the role of humanities scholars is crucial in the production and interpretation of cultural materials. There is a need to identify the values in DH which Spiro proposes are openness, collaboration, experimentation, collegiality and connectedness, and diversity and experimentation (2012a; 2012b). How the values of DH can be harnessed to enhance the humanities can be thought through in various ways; however, what is relevant to this article is in terms of bodily actions. Despite decades-long debate on DH’s role, value and relation to the humanities, much humanities research relies too much on digital technologies while critical awareness has weakened. For example, text can be quantified by forming conceptual indicators, yet the meaning temporarily fixed by researchers has limited explanatory power, thus highlighting the lack of criticism. Footnote 2 The humanistic pursuit of knowledge, which concerns subjective consciousness and is related to the viewer’s sensibility, cannot be processed by numbers themselves. In other words, in the current context of academic research ‘to have numbers’, scholars are concerned that art and literature works, for example, may only have data value after electronic transformation (Zhang and Zhang, 2021).

Becoming virtual

American scholar Lippmann proposed a concept in 1922 called “pseudo-environment” in his far-reaching book Public Opinion . Lippmann believes that newspapers, magazines and other media reconstruct a reality, which he calls a pseudo-environment. This pseudo-environment is an information environment, not an objective response to the real environment, but a new world created by the media, which shapes the audience’s picture of the real world in their minds (Lippmann, 1922 ). The original meaning of pseudo in English contains the meaning of ‘false’. Lippmann believes that the reality created by the media is not the reality that is faithfully reflected, but the reality constructed by the media organisation and the media organisation system; as long as the audience believes it, they exist in it. With the change of the media environment, the pseudo-environment, constructed by centralised media, such as newspapers and magazines, is a thing of the past. Instead, it has been replaced by the virtual environment based on the Internet. The virtual space is visual, distributed, and interactive involving user participation. While the pseudo-environment includes the participation of media organisations and ‘false’ elements in it, there is no such question of authenticity in the virtual space; or in other words, the liquid and User-Generated Content (UGC)-based new reality redefine the question of what is true and what is false.

The pseudo-environment has been replaced by virtual reality. For example, American science fiction writer Neal Stephenson published a novel Snow Crash in 1992 in which he created a space that did not exist—Metaverse. The Internet era is a digital era, and the virtual era is a dynamic and image era composed of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR). The visual space created by virtual reality does not exist in one’s imagination, nor is it completely real, but offers a kind of new bodily experience and existence independent of matter and consciousness. Therefore, the advent of this virtual era ensured and advanced by digital technologies has affected not only people’s lifestyles, such as shopping and travelling, but the way people perceive and recognise the world through bodily experience.

Digital humanities

Digital Humanities (DH) research stems from the pursuit of objectivity and comprehensiveness in the research of the humanities (Piper, 2016 ). Based on a large amount of data, it attempts to conduct quantitative analysis on the subjectivity of the humanities and obtain some factual conclusions on this basis. Digital technologies have furthered this type of research and redefined DH as a response to the transformation of the humanities in the digital age. It is generally believed that DH is a field of academic activities where computer or digital technology intersects with the humanities. The pioneer of digital humanities recognised by academic circles is Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit priest. According to Jones ( 2016 ), Busa in collaboration with IBM in 1949 made an index consisting of more than 10 million words from the Latin works of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). This epoch-making achievement combined text and calculation for the first time, which greatly promoted the application of computers in the field of linguistics. In the 1960s, statistics began to join in, the most representative of which was the new research field of ‘authorship research’, which classified author texts by counting the frequency of word occurrence or the number of word occurrences, because each author is usually considered to have unique—yet very subtle—stylistic differences in the use of common words. A typical example of this is the study of the authorship of The Federalist Papers (1787–1788). Footnote 3 The first academic journal in DH, entitled Computers and the Humanities , was launched in 1966.

William Pannapacker declared the arrival of digital humanities at the annual meeting of Modern Languages Association (MLA) conference in 2009, which is the largest and most important association in the field of humanities in the United States. Many discussions have revolved around DH ever since, focussing on three core features. Firstly, DH digitises vast experiential materials and establishes (or utilises existing) databases to lay the foundation for analysis; secondly, it introduces statistical methods, conducts data mining, compares the significant characteristics of quantitative indicators, or discovers certain patterns, trends and regular phenomena; and thirdly, there is diversification and dynamic presentation of the research results.

The first wave

There are two widely known waves in DH. The first wave took place in the late 1990s focussing on digitisation projects. Moretti ( 2000 ) believes that to study world literature, neither ‘close reading’ nor comparative methods should be used, but a new ‘distant reading’ mode should be used, that is, using databases and quantitative methods, to explain the category factors and formal elements in the overall or broader text system. For example, by using a case study on published novels, Moretti exemplifies that the excessive number of novels cannot be understood by traditional methods in the humanities, but rather it is “a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole” (2005/2007, 3–4). The impact of the first wave included data mining or large corpus processing and distant reading, which brought new insights and techniques into the humanities, as distinct from traditional methods such as close reading and textual analysis. The first wave was later summarised by Schnapp and Presner as “quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays” (2009, 2). Previous discussions regarding the first wave resulted in many binary points of views, such as close reading versus distance reading, ‘panoramic’ collective view enabled by digital technology and big data versus individual intimate experience in traditional humanities, actual versus virtual, etc. Discussion regarding the binarism of digital technologies in humanities research seems to be diminishing with the arrival of the second wave of DH.

The second wave

The second wave called Digital Humanities 2.0 arrived in the late 2000s with more complexity and wider application in practice and theory; it “is deeply generative, creating the environments and tools for producing, curating, and interacting with knowledge that is ‘born digital’ and lives in various digital contexts…[and] introduces entirely new disciplinary paradigms, convergent fields, hybrid methodologies…” (Presner, 2010 , 68). Hayles notes that DH had emerged from “the low-prestige status of a support service into a genuinely intellectual endeavour with its own professional practices, rigorous standards, and exciting theoretical explorations” (2011, 46). Many scholars had recognised by then that DH is a new way of working with representation and mediation, such as Schreibman et al. ( 2008 ), Schnapp and Presner ( 2009 ), Berry ( 2011 ) and Hayles ( 2011 ); in Presner’s words, it is a new “Normal Humanities” (2010, 11). DH in general is a new scholarly method with its “focus on the identification of novel patterns in the data as against the principle of narrative and understanding” (Berry, 2011 , 13).

Schnapp and Presner note that the second wave is “ qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character” (2009, 2, original emphasis). These characteristics of the second wave “harnesses digital toolkits in the service of the Humanities’ core methodological strengths: attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation” (Schnapp and Presner, 2009 , 2). There are increasing number of scholarly practices across the humanities as shown in the examples below that reflect the characteristic applications, as well as the significance and impact of digital technology, in the second wave of DH. Before reviewing the three selected approaches in recent works of DH 2.0 that form the path to discussion on the importance of embodiment and haptic experience in this context, it is important to reiterate that this article acknowledges and extends upon the characteristics of DH 2.0 to propose a prospective on bodily action. The experiential, emotive and generative characteristics of DH 2.0 are every concrete bodily action actualised in the process of DH practice, while moving in and out of actual and virtual spaces, seeing the collective data through individual eyes, and conducting close reading on data from distance reading, etc. are rethought in terms of bodily action and lived experience. DH practice is bodily inclusive in which there is only bodily action to count on, a digital event as culturally embodied and spatially situated.

Recent research in DH 2.0 has addressed complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation, while many fields across the humanities have incorporated approaches and arguments from DH for their own core concerns. Of particular interest to this article, there are three selected approaches concerning cultural issues, minimising digital technologies in practice, and practicing in a situated space/place, which support the proposal for the bodily inclusive in DH practice that co-produces ‘digitised’ knowledge and becomes the bodily digital.

Firstly, concerns in traditional humanities involve digital technologies, such as the commitment of some DH scholars to antiracism and feminism discussions as well as Black studies. For example, Prince et al. ( 2022 ) call for a more equitable field based on the current challenging and difficult situation confronting DH Black scholars. Adams ( 2022 ) examines how Black fans use social media platforms to engage fandoms of contemporary Black popular cultural productions. Similar approaches in DH has been flourishing in cultural studies, gender studies, and minority/marginalised group studies in relation to topics such as colonialism (Alpert-Abrams and McCarl, 2021 ), feminist, queer and LGBTQ+ issues (Ketchum, 2020 ), exclusion of women and scholars of colour (Nowviskie, 2015 ), and how DH is reinforcing a gender gap in the field and a gendering of DH work itself (Wernimont, 2013 ; Olofsson, 2015 ; Mandell, 2016 ). The voices and opinions in the above groups across various studies are critical to understanding the social and cultural atmosphere and political climate, thereby forging a more inclusive path towards understanding society. The digital technologies engaged in the above research are seen as part of the social and cultural environment in facilitating the making of their qualitative comments as well as interpretations of their core concerns in the cultural domain.

Secondly, there is an enquiry about the necessity of using digital technologies, termed the concept of digital minimalism, or minimal computing according to Risam ( 2018 ). Gil ( 2015 ) questions “what do we need?” in an effort to reflect upon and recalibrate the increasing use of digital technologies. Wythoff ( 2022 ) notes that minimal computing focusses on “cultural practices rather than tools or platforms” and “prioritizes a humanist approach to technology”. Risam describes minimal computing as “a range of cultural practices that privilege making do with available materials to engage in creative problem-solving and innovation” (2018, 43). In actual practice, the concept is manifested as minimal design, maximum justice and minimal technical language (Sayer, 2016 ) to privilege wider access and openness to community. For example, Risam and Edwards ( 2017 ) practice minimal computing by embracing small data sets, local archives, and freely available platforms for creating small-scale digital humanities projects. Privileging making and shifting focus back on cultural practice in traditional thought, digital minimalism accommodates the impact of digital technologies and ensures wider access by reducing the use of high-tech and instead regarding digital technologies as merely tools and platforms. This approach is conscious of the body-tool relation and critiques the idea of ‘the more, or stronger, the better’. Despite partially disagreeing with digital minimalism’s strategy that seemingly has a sense of ‘withdrawal’ from, and reluctance towards, ever-growing digital technologies, we appreciate their thinking on making , which connects with bodily inclusive action in our argument. We thereby propose that the bodily inclusive in DH practices become digital events to embrace the ever-increasing use of digital technologies in everyday life. The full discussion on bodily embodiment in relation to digital technology is in the penultimate section of this article. Before that, we will outline the next approach concerning the DH lab/centre as a situated place/space that indirectly points to bodily actions taking place within, which is of interest to the article in terms of the emotive and generative sense of knowledge production/transfer in DH 2.0.

Thirdly, discussion on space and place is called situated research practice in DH (Oiva and Pawlicka-Deger, 2020 ), whereby research activities are typically undertaken in DH centres and laboratories in terms of ‘situatedness’. Many scholars argue that the DH lab/centre is more than a physical place. For example, based on a review of the ‘laboratory turn’ in the humanities, Pawlicka-Deger ( 2020 ) notes that the space and place of lab/centre has been conceptualised in relation to ways of thinking, communicating and working entailing new social practices and new research modes. There are five models of DH labs Footnote 4 that can be categorised and analysed to reflect the lab/centre as concept, initiative, and programme.

While the DH lab/centre is conceptually regarded as a problem-based project rather than a physical workspace, the emphasis is on collaboration, experimentation, and hands-on practices in the laboratorial space. That is to say, for example, “the manner in which the knowledge-transfer activities in DH communities are facilitated affects the knowledge they produce” (Oiva, 2020 ). Exploring the situatedness of DH lab/centre, Malazita et al. ( 2020 ) claim that “laboratory structures and cultures produce specific kinds of knowledge practitioners…[who] in turn produce and police the boundaries of legitimate and recognizable knowledge work…[a]ll of these productions are, in part, results of particular institutional and disciplinary positions”. Moreover, “knowledge is inseparable from the communities that create it, its context, structure, and the means with which it is produced and shared” (Oiva, 2020 ). Acknowledging the main idea of Oiva and Malazita et al. that it is important to understand the practices, structures, and the community underlying knowledge construction, we nonetheless argue there is also the presence of the body, which is culturally embodied and historically inherited, in the situated laboratorial space. Lived and immanent bodily interactions take place in the situated DH labs/centres and communities simultaneously while transferring/producing knowledge.

Bodily interaction actively constructs the DH lab/centre as a cultural space via the professional practice undertaken within as a dynamic process, an event of happening. Borrowing the concept of epistemic culture (Knorr Cetina, 1999 ), Malazita et al. ( 2020 ) point out that in terms of “the material and epistemic production of DH labs, their spaces, cultures, practices, and products…humanities scholars…must be produced as epistemic subjects through the interactions of their education, the objects, the field, and the documentary and critical writings about the objects”. To extend on this, movement in terms of the sociological body can add an extra lens to think through the situatedness of DH practice in a more complex and medium-specific way. The narrative of bodily movement is about historical context and analytical depth that is always engaged in critiques and interpretations.

Research method

The article proposes an alternative approach for DH practice as process-inclusive in the sense that bodily interaction, when operating or accommodating digital technologies while moving in and out of virtual and actual space for example, is itself critical and humane at a bodily level. The article builds on previous studies on embodiment (Liu, 2018 , 2022 ), actual and virtual space (Liu, 2020 ; Liu and Lan, 2020 , 2021 ) and bodily movement (Liu and Lan, 2021 ; Lan and Liu, 2023 ) to rethink bodily inclusive DH practice. After reviewing the discussion of DH 1.0 emphasising on the development of technology and analysis on cultural content, as well as of DH 2.0 with attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation. Our proposal on the bodily approach in the process of knowledge making in understanding DH practice is particularly timely as the boundary, in terms of bodily experience, between actual and virtual space is increasingly blurred. In other words, the article predicts in the forthcoming Digital Humanities 3.0 wherein bodily accommodated digital technologies actively contribute to knowledge production in understanding the world.

The body, or the sociological body, has been extensively studied in a multitude of ways in sociological thinking and research by scholars such as Synnott ( 1993 ), Featherstone et al. ( 1991 ), Strathern ( 1996 ), Csordas ( 1994 ), Turner ( 1996 ), and Williams and Bendelow ( 1998 ); their intellectual contributions are discussed elsewhere and will not be repeated here. Since the body has been reconciled as “simultaneously a social and biological entity which is in a constant state of becoming” (Shilling, 1993 , 27), the body in this article is understood as a historically inherited and culturally embodied being (Liu, 2018 ) that is acted upon by institutions (Foucault, 1991 ). Bodily actions from everyday life—derived from the sociological concept of body techniques, or in Mauss’s term “the habitus” (1979, 101), which are “forms of embodied pre-reflective understanding, knowledge or reason…[that] distinguish and differentiate social groups” (Crossley, 2005 , 7–8) and have their own cultural interests and political motivations—are extended into the world of the virtual. Body technique is a “learned and incorporated skill” (Ravn, 2017 , 59), whereby the body first “act[s] to the skill qua thematized goal” and then acts “from” the skill (Leder, 1990 , 32) toward further goals. The body itself is in action to practice in DH research. The body in action, by exemplifying the disciplinary mechanisms or control in everyday society for example, is manipulating of, or being compromised by, digital technology; thereby, the bodily experience is impacted upon in ways of seeking, obtaining, selecting, analysing and interpreting data. Being subjective and critical in traditional humanities can be always present in DH, but co-produced with digital technologies.

Kinesics is the term coined in the study of bodily movements according to Birdwhistell ( 1952 ; 1970 ), which investigates and interprets nonverbal behavior (Ekman and Friesen, 1969 ), Footnote 5 such as facial expression (Raman and Singh, 2006 ), Footnote 6 gestures (Andersen, 1999 ), Footnote 7 posture (Pearse and Pearse, 2005 ; Patel, 2014 ), and bodily movements. Acknowledging studies conducted over the past decades with various emphasis and empirical parameters, bodily movement are taken as symbolic or metaphorical in social and cultural interaction. For example, body gestures (Kendon, 1981 ) and hand gestures (McNeill, 1992 ) are systemic and socially learned, Footnote 8 which touching behaviors and movements can express the internal state of a person of being arousal or anxiety (Andersen, 1999 ). The haptic experience of touching is tactile contact with oneself, objects, and others.

This article proposes a focus on the concrete actions of the body in practice mobilising/compromising digital technologies as an essential part of the research activity where new bodily experience emerges. The shift in focus to the bodily inclusive is timely in rethinking the current position of DH as being neither discipline nor interdiscipline. Instead, advanced digital technology, such as the forthcoming Web 3.0, is able to significantly narrow the boundary between virtual and actual bodily experience, whereby bodily inclusive DH practice can be seen as an event, a production itself; therefore, the embodied bodily movement is a critical response to research activities regardless of the research outcome. Humanities is the pursuit in which new knowledge is produced, and the anticipated Digital Humanities 3.0 is the process of experiencing in which new (digital) bodily experience is realised, thereby affecting the understanding of the world. In a parallel discussion, Fish ( 2012 ) notes, “Each reorganization (sometimes called a ‘deformation’) creates a new text that can be reorganized in turn and each new text raises new questions that can be pursued to the point where still newer questions emerge”, which implies that research is embedded in the ongoing process of (re)making and experimenting.

Therefore, moving away from debates concerning technology, method or criticalness etc., while embracing qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive and generative characteristics, thinking bodily action, humanities and digital technology altogether is to propose the situatedness of the bodily encounter in the process of making in the digital age. In this paradigm, the certainty of knowledge that researchers arrive at is not due to what things have been done but how things have been done upon every single bodily movement, wherein bodily experience is essential in knowledge making in the digital environment. Digital technology is more than a neutral medium, rather it has grown to actively contribute towards co-forming the realisation of the world. Two cases are examined to reflect DH practice as embodied action. The first is the practice of a fashion designer whose traditional garment making skills intertwine with digital technology resulting in new bodily experience and haptic knowledge in mixed realities. Footnote 9 The second reviews a research practice on an online community using data analysis in which the bodily inclusive proposes an alternative approach.

Digital Humanities 3.0 as embodied act: making, interpreting and criticalness

Kirschenbaum notes that DH is more akin to a common methodological outlook (2012), which perhaps downgrades the significance of DH and its potential to be a new space in comprehending and forming the world. Some scholars question whether the centre and the boundaries of DH remain amorphous (McCarty, 2016 ); Svensson ( 2016 ), for example, describes DH as being in a liminal state, that it is neither discipline nor interdiscipline. DH seems to have huge potentiality; however, at the same time, its promised future is continually delayed in which its highly anticipated impact has not yet been fully realised (Alvarado, 2012 ).

The role of humanities scholars always concerns the production and interpretation of cultural materials in constantly changing cultural and social environments, rather than focussing on technological progress (Fitzpatrick, 2010 ), which is also coherent with Earhart’s view that DH should engage theoretically with technology, not merely with the content of technologies (2012a; 2012b). Cong-Huyen ( 2015 ) and Parikka ( 2012 ), for example, mobilise critical theories to bridge the ‘natural’ progression of technology and critical thinking on cultural materials. This article argues that, on the premise of ever-strengthening digital technologies, bodily movement becomes the meeting point of the two, whereby immanent and irreducible bodily actions operate technologies in the ways to favour the latter’s own interest, while the operational technologies reinforce the users in perceiving the world, in which actions are taken in field study, searching for materials, visualising the research, and enhancing decision making, as well as accommodating various digital technologies in the process of knowledge making. Bodily movement is specific to the medium with attention paid to details and complexity, wherein the body is cultural and physical in its historical context, which in turn diversifies the understanding of DH 2.0 practice. Moreover, the bodily experience in everyday research practice could become prominent in and provide alternative ways of thinking to DH 3.0. The interaction between body and digital technologies in everyday experience determines what knowledge can be produced and how it is to be presented. Concrete actions determine bodily experience and subsequent understanding of the world, which are what humanities scholars work with, and are affected by and inseparable from. From everyday practice, new realisations emerge in bodily actions and reactions situated in the digital environment, some of which are immature, controversial or even handicapped, yet they actively contribute to the perception of the world.

Negroponte ( 1995 ) notes that digitalisation has created a new living space, and people in the digital age live more in the virtual space constructed by digital technology. What is emphasised here is that while people study, work and communicate in this space, regardless of whether it is actual, virtual or mixed, bodily actions are taking place to create new literature, art, history and even culture in the virtual interaction. After more than two decades later, the increasing integration of body and technology allows DH practice to become an event, in which the embodied body acts and reacts in a situated digital environment. Therefore, bodily actions itself is the process of knowledge making that leads to new realisation and ‘digitised’ knowledge.

Narrowing the ‘gap’ – connecting body to DH in digital fashion design practice

The selected and synthesised historical trajectories of the growth of DH not only demonstrate the increasing impact of digital technologies upon everyday life, but also pave the way towards conceptualising the connection of DH to the body. The observable ever-strengthening technologies and deepening of everyday engagement have prompted the rethinking of the situated body in terms of DH. This brings the ideas of ‘digitised’ body, ‘digitised’ knowledge and embodiment into focus, especially given the high number of everyday experiences involving the mix of actual and virtual realities. The realisation of dematerialization does not entail embracing virtuality by abandoning materiality. But rather, dematerialisation reflects a new type of ‘digitised’ knowledge and embodiment in mixed reality. The everyday body can visually experience the simulated virtual space while the body remains situated in the actual environment in terms of haptic experience, for example.

The haptic, as a somatic sense of touch, has been studied extensively in the field of psychology with recent scholarship focusing on touch or non-visual senses (Classen, 1997 ; Stoller, 1997 ; Geurts, 2005 ; Howes, 2003 ; Feld, 2005 ; Paterson, 2007 ). Bodily actions are embodied, tactile and spatial experiences, that arise from touching and sensing via skin, for example, and provide a sense of immediacy for the body when interacting with actual space; it is “like a journey inward into the fibrous and synaptic entanglements of a diffuse nerve-muscle system” (Paterson, 2011 , 266). Bodily actions in a physical space combine several somatic senses, namely, the modalities of proprioception as the body’s muscular tension, kinaesthesia as the sense of the body’s movement, and vestibular sense as a sense of balance (Paterson, 2007 , 4). That is to say, apart from our visual perception, virtual space is also experienced and understood through our skin, such as through touch. Digital fashion designers in everyday practice, for instance, are visually immersed in the world of the virtual, and whose bodies have ‘retaught’ their physical experience via virtual experience. This is a type of haptic experience embodied in digital action, or digitised embodiment, which impacts upon the actual body continuously into their everyday lives.

Scholarly investigations on digitised embodiment have examined how the body interacts with, and is (re)configured by, digital technologies, focusing on various increasingly digitised environments—such as “sensor-saturated physical environments” (Lupton, 2017 , 202), where the body is exposed to, grows with, and is constantly under surveillance—that configurate and reconfigure bodily actions (Bauman and Lyon, 2012 ; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011 ; Kitchin, 2014 ). The body is digitised and recorded constantly while surfing online, walking under surveillance, talking on the smartphone, body scanning for health checks, etc., hereby reproduced by/in the digitised environment. In other words, digital data are generated and used to further discipline bodily behaviours. The complex relation between body and digital technology is full of entanglements, as well as inextricabilities in terms of sociomaterialism, which argues social and materiality aspects are entangled in an organisational life (Orlikowski, 2007 ). In Orlikowski and Scott’s words: “sociomateriality is integral, inherent, and constitutive, shaping the contours and possibilities of everyday organizing” (2008, 463). The inextricable, intertwining in-between reflects that the body is a digital data assemblage (Lupton, 2015 ). The entanglements in, and co-configuration of, each other, between body and digital technology, reflect a type of bodily knowing that is inclusive of haptic experience.

Bodily knowing, apart from being related to individual consciousness of the body’s physical conditions, is the understanding of and interaction with its surroundings, which are usually occupied by other bodies and objects. As Lupton notes, “[w]e experience the world as fleshly bodies, via the sensations and emotions configured through and by our bodies as they relate to other bodies and to material objects and spaces” (2017, 201). The body extends beyond its physical entity and is distributed into the inhabited space involving embodied interactions and affective responses, whereby embodiment is a relational assemblage (Lupton, 2017 ). While feelings are produced through interaction between self and world (Labanyi, 2010 , 223), the body in environment touches and is touched.

Acknowledging that the virtual is anthropological (Boellstorff, 2008 , 237), anthropological methods can be applied to investigating the world of the virtual by (re)interpreting socio-cultural relations manifested in virtual space, such as social status, gender issues, disabilities, ethnicities, class, etc. For example, scholars in videogame studies investigate bodily representations in virtual space, with focus on the presence, absence, and types of the portrayal of social groups in terms of identity, gender, and sexuality (Downs and Smith, 2005 ; Heintz-Knowles et al. 2001 ; Janz and Martis, 2007 ; Williams et al. 2009 ), and the phenomenological experiences of engaging with third-person videogames, which the player controls the game through avatars that results in control of three bodies: the avatar’s body, player’s own body, and visual perspective of a “game body” (Crick, 2011 , 262). Footnote 10 Bodily actions may be conducted in actuality, yet their simulated impact virtually can achieve certain new actions created in the situated mixed reality where body capacities and boundaries can be rethought in terms of situatedness. The bodily actions conducted while comprehending the mixed environment via haptic experience produce new ‘digitised’ knowledge and become the bodily digital. The case study on digital fashion design practice is analysed to substantiate the thinking of the bodily digital whereby the body in everyday practice/life is the product of digital actions that, in turn, lead to ‘digitised’ knowledge.

Designing digital cloth requires relatively fewer intensive actions, mostly limited to the operation of computer devices, including typing on the keyboard, dragging and clicking the mouse, etc., compared to traditional methods in the process of garment making, such as sewing, stitching and cutting, which involve the participation of the whole body, where the texture of fabrics is sensed and understood mainly via touch. When touching occurs, somatosensory signals are transduced by nerves, either as the pressure felt by the designer’s fingertips pressing against the textile, or the temperature felt from the warmth of the fabric on the skin. The haptic knowledge about textiles is embedded in designers who were initially trained in traditional methods; subsequently, their bodily experience casts the approach and fosters the understanding of digital garment making. Moreover, digital clothing, which require comparatively fewer complex bodily tasks in the process of making, is done in virtual space that prompts designers to rethink their bodily boundary and capacities in the mixed (in)tangible world. There is a correlation between a simple latitude action taken with minimum muscular tension, and achieving rather complex tasks in digital space. The narrowing ‘gap’ between the body and the digital is manifested in the case of digital fashion design practice that reflects how the haptic experience is digitised, and how the digital experience is bodily digital. Designers engaging with digital data assemblages are in turn managed and manipulated by the assemblages that impact upon their ways of knowing and embodiment in their practice that is situated in mixed reality. “Technologies discipline the body to better assimilate it to their requirements, their ways of seeing, monitoring and treating human flesh” (Lupton, 2017 , 203).

Fashion designers not only use 3D-technology to create digital prototyping and sampling of the garment for final visualisation, but also to think through, with and alongside the digital technologies and new media (Manovich, 2020 ; Hansen, 2006 ; Hayles, 2012 ), as supported by Johnston’s argument (2012) on the concept of autonomy in technology, which is originally from Kittler ( 1990 ). The digital transformation, called digital mediatisation or ‘digital fashion’ (Milne, 2019 ), in the investigation on fashion and its relation to digital media (Rocamora, 2017 , 505), takes place in many facets, such as fashion shows, collections design and retailing, that turn the products, wearers and environments partially or entirely virtual. Although many hurdles and challenges have been identified, such as how fashion design practice can create meaningful content for digital worlds (Tepe and Koohnavard, 2023 ), the shift to computer-aided design (CAD), such as CLO3D and Browzwear, is becoming popular in everyday design practice. The technology enables and enhances design processes operating under the concept of greener and more sustainable design, such as the use of digital 3D software in zero-waste fashion design practice (McQuillan, 2020 ) and 3D virtual prototyping as a new medium and influence on design methods and visual thinking (Siersema, 2015 ).

The digital work, entitled The Region ‘X’ , created by fashion designer Tianjiao Wang in 2022, with its theme on the human body intertwining with all things, is inspired by a movie called Annihilation (Garland, 2018 ). Wang is trained in traditional methods of garment making accompanied with essential knowledge and bodily skills, but has lately turned her attention to the digital field, creating collections using software. For example, the pattern cutting and silhouette of The Region ‘X’ are done by CAD and Photoshop respectively, and the virtual fabric reinforcement is manipulated in CLO3D, as shown in Fig. 1 . The sagging effect of cloth as a visual experimentation is done by Cinema 4D, which allows for continuous adjustments of the garment style and shape and detailed design in the virtual environment. RIZOMUV is used to arrange and disassemble the UV and to optimise the position of the panels. Painting the surface materials of the garment is then done by Adobe Substance 3D Painter, as shown in Fig. 2 . Accessories, such as hand decoration, shoes and hats, are created in Cinema 4D.

The visual experimentation, such as the sagging effect of cloth, is simulated in Cinema 4D. The virtual reality allows for continuous adjustments of the garment style and shape. Photo credit: Tianjiao Wang, 2023.

Wang experiments with painting on the surface of garment materials in Adobe Substance 3D Painter. Visually triggered ‘touch’ experience takes place in this practice. Photo credit: Tianjiao Wang, 2023.

Digital technology is used as a means of creating alternative fashion-related experiences for digital and hybrid spaces, introducing practitioners to possibilities beyond the construction of physical products through digital means. The concept has been widely implemented in contemporary fashion education; for example: new technologies are taught at fashion schools (Bain, 2022 ); new teaching models are associated with technology learning (Bertola and Colombi, 2021 ); digital skills are used in the fashion studio (Särmäkari, 2023 ); and body-diverse methods are used in designing dress in the digital age (Tepe, 2022 ). Yet, digital fashion is more than a visual festival; advanced digital technology is not a better tool than the sewing machine, for example. As shown in Wang’s case, the body interacts with and is situated in the mixed reality, where the sensorial body is in full operation and becomes bodily digital. The body is the product of digital actions and is a digital embodied being. Tactile experience, via touch and feel, which is essential for traditional designers in differentiating and selecting textures and materials that express individuality and create meanings, is significantly intertwined with visual experience in the digital space. In this sense, the texture and material of fabrics, such as wool, cotton, linen, synthetic polyester, etc., are identified by visual perception, given the capacity of CAD, such as CLO3D and Browzwear, to vividly delineate various textures on screen. In other words, the simulated materiality shown on screen is detected by visual means and ‘perceived’ by the body in front of the computer with haptic experience via touching the keypad, clicking on the mouse, etc. The digital design practice provokes the memory of bodily touching materials, which is reassured visually on screen, therefore that fabric is ‘touched’, ‘felt’ and selected. This mixed reality practice produces a type of haptic experience, which involves the visual. The intertwining of the body with mixed realities via visual and haptic experience makes the bodily digital or digital embodiment, in which ‘digitised’ knowledge is produced as the body becomes the product of digital actions (Fig. 3 ).

Photo credit: Tianjiao Wang, 2023.

Mobilising the bodily inclusive in research activity

Thinking digital technology (such as Web 3.0), humanities and contemporary theory of bodily embodiment altogether is being bodily inclusive in research activity. There are no identical bodily actions taking place, for example, among different scholars or by the same scholar in different projects, regardless of the methods used. The attention on bodily actions brings forth an alternative thought process to help with re-examining and improving incomplete research, offering a pathway other than a concrete conclusion as a traditional research outcome. Take for example Zhu’s ( 2021 ) analysis based on distance reading of 1500 review comments collected as a small fraction out of the total of 654,914 comments on the Internet platform Douban regarding the famous Chinese movie The Wandering Earth . Footnote 11 Review comments were collected solely from Douban, which means that data from other major Chinese online platforms are not taken into consideration. To go beyond Zhu’s limited conclusion on the movie, which attracted great public attention and opinion in the Douban community, the bodily inclusive approach can offer further possible work to be done in terms of the online users and the scholarly practice.

Online social media environment such as Douban have specific users in terms of gender, age, cultural background, social status, etc. as well as online behaviours that are relatively consistent. The 1500 comments were first screened and selected by Douban as the gatekeeper before being made available to viewers, including Zhu. Without an understanding of the criteria used by Douban in screening and selecting comments, that is to say, in determining what can or cannot be seen by viewers, the analysis of the 1500 comments could be misleading in reflecting the viewers’ genuine attitude towards the movie in the Douban community. Despite the current limitations of the research, thinking the bodily inclusive can alter the focus to, for instance, bodily actions of online users, who are differentiated in gender, age, cultural background and social status, moving in and out of actual and virtual space while operating and being operated by digital technologies, whereby digital bodily actions become an active part in perceiving and reflecting their perception and attitude towards the movie. There is a potential pathway for Zhu to pursue deeper understanding and to obtain further insights about the impact of the movie on the online community by focussing on the users’ bodily interactions in relation to digital technologies, Footnote 12 rather than relying on and being limited by the official screening of the comments against certain criteria and social values. For example, Piper investigates online reading concerning users’ hands (2012), that reading body in a digital environment requires greater haptic intelligence (McLaughlin, 2015 ). The impact of digitisation on tactility and the sensory responses of users (Mangen and Schilhab, 2012 ) reflects upon bodily actions. Online reading is a practice that is “material, embodied, and responsive to [the] environment” (Thomas, 2021 , 2), while the reading body in actions is tactile, situated, and creative.

Bodily actions, such as extending the arm and moving the fingers to grab a cup of tea in actual space, is studied within the scope of anthropology and social science, where bodily gesture and the action sequences reflect social status, gender issues, disabilities, ethnicities, individuality, etc., while meanings and interpretations are (re)produced. While research has extended into the world of the virtual to investigate the avatar as the representation of the body and its relation to other avatars in a virtual ‘socio-cultural’ environment for example (Villani et al. 2016 ; Freeman and Maloney, 2021 ), there is a body present in front of the computer screen whose tactile experience continues, and whose digitised embodiment reflects the intimate interconnection between DH and the body. That is to say, there is scope to observe and study the situated body of Internet users, acted upon by socio-cultural institutions, and how they exercise power and behave online via concrete bodily movement. Observing and measuring bodily gestures and movements in the way the users drink, smoke, talk, etc. while clicking the mouse, touching the screen, and typing the keyboard to make/delete online comments or ‘like’ things, can provide further insights in terms of the interrelationship between online and offline behaviours. Footnote 13 Furthermore, the interrelationship is mutually impactful between digital technologies and the body as culturally embodied and historically inherited being; bodily action in front of the computer screen is a reflection of this interrelationship.

To observe and study the bodily inclusive on both the scholars who are situated in a digital environment while conducting research activities, and certain groups of people acting online as the study objects, is to think the ‘gap’ and the moment of close encounter between the body and digital technologies. In other words, in the encounter of the two, the characteristics of DH 2.0 come into play as being at once qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive and generative, as well as being immanent and lived experience. Moreover, it is foreseeable that increased interactivity and user participation enabled by Web 2.0 (Davidson, 2012 ) are further strengthened by Web 3.0, in which bodily experience in actual and virtual space would be no longer separable for example. Thinking body, digital technology, and humanities altogether, along with the arrival of Web 3.0, is a means to image DH 3.0 in terms of the trans-disciplinary, focussing on the concept of the digital lived encounter.

Furthermore, thinking the bodily inclusive in the process of DH activities is to say Zhu’s research is more than offering a conclusion with more or less limitation though, drawn from database analysis that is always partial and shown in visualised patterns that have to be simplified to allow wider access. Yet, a clear pathway of how the multiple decisions made and led to the conclusion is reflected on the bodily actions. For instance, the process of research involved a large number of Zhu’s bodily actions in interacting with the database that are mutually impactful and can be tracked and reviewed anytime afterwards. In other words, the making in DH practice is a creating of indexicality, a sign pointing to some aspect of its context of occurrence, where each interaction of the involved data as the context, which is selected, omitted, (re)edited and (re)ordered, projects the occurrence of bodily action in front of the computer screen. Every bodily gesture and movement taken contributes to the perception formed by the body towards the world, and impacts upon knowledge production. Therefore, Zhu’s research subject matter is ‘1500 review comments’, but it can also be equally thought that the subject is the work of Zhu’s series of bodily movements interacting with the data in real time in mixed space as an extension of Zhu’s cultural body. The making in DH practice is also the creation of human indexicality. Thinking the bodily inclusive is to acknowledge and unveil the process of knowledge production in DH practice where the constant interaction and mutual impact of operating digital technologies throughout the research is full of criticalness and decision making.

Thinking the bodily inclusive is to go beyond the earlier productive work via traditional methods, which has been erased by the process with only a conclusion at the end. There is no such a thing called ‘raw’ data that seems innocent, as data is mined, collected, stored, sorted, (re)visited, extracted, analysed, deleted and restored via and by bodily actions. There is a reshuffle and a re-ordering and therefore re-interpretion of the data every time a bodily action takes place. Hence, the bodily actions in the research process reflect and visualise the pathway of certain bodily experience gradually accumulated that contribute to the production of knowledge, apart from and along with the fixed and must-be-arrived-at ‘conclusion’ of research.

Acknowledging humanities scholars don’t do things as usual and simply extend their traditional activities enabled by the advantages of networked digital technology, DH transcends beyond a discipline and a research field. It can be seen as a response of and a new exploration in the humanities to the digital age. Therefore, the article proposes an alternative approach for understanding and engaging the concept of the sociological body in order to introduce the bodily inclusive in DH practice, which hints at the possibilities of ‘digitised’ knowledge production and haptic knowledge in upcoming DH 3.0. Digital technology changes the pathway of bodily experience created in research and conceptualisation, in which bodily action is characterised and partially formed by digital technology. The value of the humanities embodied in and reflected on bodily actions would inform and simultaneously be informed by the ways technologies are manipulated, in which certain knowledge is produced and perception towards the world is formed. In other words, the interaction between body and digital technology, which is capable of diminishing the boundary between actual and virtual experience for example, contributes to the perception towards the world.

Apart from technology being a tool, a medium, a laboratory, or a vehicle for activism (Svensson, 2009 , 2010 ) in Web 2.0, bodily actions in upcoming DH 3.0 actively co-make the knowledge of and the understanding towards the world, embedded via the interaction with digital technology. Digital technology not just provides new ways for concepts to be communicated, but new ways to co-produce bodily actions. In a parallel discussion, Hogsden and Poulter consider digital experience “an alternative reciprocal model” (2012, 82) while King et al. regard the digital encounter as a “different category from physical encounters” (2016, 86). For Heim, “virtual worlds…do not simply reproduce the existential features of reality but transform them beyond immediate recognition” (1993, 32). In short, the use of digital technology offers a type of new bodily experience. Therefore, to think the significant engagement of digital technologies as the condition of and the impact upon bodily actions and experience in this process of knowledge production is to say that the certain knowledge is produced by, and can only be, the interactions between body and digital technology, which is how we understand new bodily experience in the digital age and the bodily digital, thereby the knowledge produced by the bodily digital is called ‘digitised’ knowledge.

Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this research as no data were generated or analysed.

DH is sometimes anti-disciplinary as it does not fit within traditional academic disciplines. Interdisciplinary brings scholars together across disciplines to create an integrated science instead of fragmented disciplines.

There are methods such as qualitative content analysis in communication study that coding is formed to reduce masses of information in traditional text, and variable matrix is subjected to statistical analysis. Further readings refer to Kuckartz ( 2014 ) and Schreier ( 2012 ).

Chinese scholars Chen Dakang and Li Xianping also tried to use this method to determine the copyright of A Dream of Red Mansions [紅樓夢] in the 1980s.

They are the center-type lab, techno-science lab, work station-type lab, social challenges-centric lab, and virtual lab (Pawlicka-Deger, 2020 ).

According to Ekman and Friesen, there are five categories of nonverbal behavior in terms of psychology.

Raman and Singh note the five basic physical descriptions of facial expressions, which are neutral, relaxed, tense, uplifted, and droopy.

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Kendon examines body gestures in terms of communication; and McNeill proposes a general classification of four types of hand gestures, including beat, deictic, iconic, and metaphoric.

I acknowledge the example that the digital practice of fashion designers might not be considered integral to DH discourses globally in some scholars’ thoughts. Nevertheless, the case supports the argument of how the haptic experience in physical space is re-mediated through digital technology.

According to Crick, the “game body” is “the software-simulated mobile camera that follows (or inhabits) a game character in a virtual world” (2011, 261).

Douban is one of the major Chinese online platforms providing information about novels, movies, TV series, music, stage plays, etc. where users can search, comment, communicate, and interact with each other. There are over 200 million registered users and over 400 million monthly active users as of the end of 2019. https://www.douban.com/partner/intro

Interactions include bodily movement and associate ‘motor action’.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the project FRG-22-005-INT and granted by the Research Fund of Macau University of Science and Technology (FRG-MUST). Images provided by fashion designer Tianjiao Wang. The authors state and acknowledge that the article focuses on North American perspectives. The sources and references are primarily from North American contexts which shape the perspectives and argument, such as the framing of the analysis and discussion.

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Digital humanities (DH) is a multi- and interdisciplinary field as well as a set of methods and approaches that combine computational methods with humanistic inquiry. Digital humanities practice often also involves critical evaluation and reflection on the tools that enable the work.

This guide provides an introduction to DH, resources at Stanford and beyond for conducting and publishing DH research, and information about participating in the DH community. Looking for someone to contact? Reach out to Alix Keener, Digital Scholarship Coordinator ([email protected]), and/or the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR) in the Library ([email protected]). 

Introductory Reading

• " The History of Humanities Computing ,” Susan Hockey,  A Companion to Digital Humanities , 2004 
• " The Humanities, Done Digitally ,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick,  Debates in the Digital Humanities,  2012
• “ This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities ," Lisa Spiro,  Debates in the Digital Humanities,  2012
• “ How Did They Make That? ” Miriam Posner, blog post, 2013
• "A Digital Humanities What, Why, & How" , Amanda Visconti, blog post, 2016
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Digital Humanities in Practice: From Research Questions to Results

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Combine literary research with data science to find answers in unexpected ways. Learn basic coding tools to draw insights from thousands of documents at once.

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From the printing press to the typewriter, there is a long history of scholars adapting to new technologies. In the last forty or fifty years, the most significant advance has been the digitization of books. We now have whole libraries—centuries of history, literature, and philosophy—available instantaneously. This new access is a wonderful benefit, but it can also be overwhelming. If you have hundreds of thousands of books available to you in an instant, where do you even start? With a bit of elementary code, you can study all of these books at once, and derive new sorts of insights.

Computation is changing the very nature of how we do research in the humanities. Tools from data science can help you to explore the record of human culture in ways that just wouldn’t have been possible before. You’re more likely to reach out to others, to work across disciplines, and to assemble teams. Whether you're a student wanting to expand your skillset, a librarian supporting new modes of research, or a journalist who has just received a massive cache of leaked e-mails, this course will show you how to draw insights from thousands of documents at once. You will learn how, with a few simple lines of code, to make use of the metadata—the information about our objects of study—to zero in on what matters most, and visualize your results so that you can understand them at a glance.

In this course, you’ll work on building parts of a search engine, one tailor-made to the needs of academic research. Along the way, you'll learn the fundamentals of text analysis: a set of techniques for manipulating the written word that stand at the core of the digital humanities.

By the end of the course, you will be able to apply what you learn to what interests you most, be it contemporary speeches, journalism, caselaw, and even art objects. This course will analyze pieces of 18th-century literature, showing you how these methods can be applied to philosophical works, religious texts, political and historical records – material from across the spectrum of humanistic inquiry.

Combine your traditional research skills with data science to find answers you never might have expected.

The course will be delivered via edX and connect learners around the world. By the end of the course, participants will:

• Understand which digital methods are most suitable to meaningfully analyze large databases of text
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• Analyze thousands of books with digital methods such as topic modeling, vector models, and concept search
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When you enroll in this course, you will have the option of pursuing a Verified Certificate or Auditing the Course.

A Verified Certificate costs $219 and provides unlimited access to full course materials, activities, tests, and forums. At the end of the course, learners who earn a passing grade can receive a certificate. 

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Archives, linked data and the digital humanities: increasing access to digitised and born-digital archives via the semantic web

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• Published: 27 December 2021
• Volume 22 , pages 319–344, ( 2022 )

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Mass digitisation and the exponential growth of born-digital archives over the past two decades have resulted in an enormous volume of archives and archival data being available digitally. This has produced a valuable but under-utilised source of large-scale digital data ripe for interrogation by scholars and practitioners in the Digital Humanities. However, current digitisation approaches fall short of the requirements of digital humanists for structured, integrated, interoperable, and interrogable data. Linked Data provides a viable means of producing such data, creating machine-readable archival data suited to analysis using digital humanities research methods. While a growing body of archival scholarship and praxis has explored Linked Data, its potential to open up digitised and born-digital archives to the Digital Humanities is under-examined. This article approaches Archival Linked Data from the perspective of the Digital Humanities, extrapolating from both archival and digital humanities Linked Data scholarship to identify the benefits to digital humanists of the production and provision of access to Archival Linked Data. It will consider some of the current barriers preventing digital humanists from being able to experience the benefits of Archival Linked Data evidenced, and to fully utilise archives which have been made available digitally. The article argues for increased collaboration between the two disciplines, challenges individuals and institutions to engage with Linked Data, and suggests the incorporation of AI and low-barrier tools such as Wikidata into the Linked Data production workflow in order to scale up the production of Archival Linked Data as a means of increasing access to and utilisation of digitised and born-digital archives.

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Introduction

The mass digitisation of archives and exponential growth in born-digital archives over the past two decades, together with the publication of large volumes of aggregated cultural heritage metadata over the past decade, have resulted in an enormous volume of archives and associated (meta)data, being available digitally. This has produced a valuable but under-utilised source of large-scale digital data ripe for interrogation by scholars and practitioners in the interdisciplinary field of the Digital Humanities, opening up digitised archives to a range of novel digital research methods. Using computational methods, digital humanists interrogate large digital datasets to address an ever-expanding range of humanities questions. This article has adopted a broad interpretation of the term “the Digital Humanities” as being at the intersection of computational technologies and humanities scholarship (Schreibman et al. 2004 ), and uses the term “digital humanist” to refer to any person engaged in scholarship or practice within the field of Digital Humanities and/or using computational methods for humanities research. The Digital Humanities is driven by digital data; however, it is not enough that archival data is available digitally, it needs to be integrated, interoperable, and interrogable (Bikakis 2021 ; Koho et al. 2021 ; Zeng 2019 ). Current approaches to digitisation—the process of producing a digital surrogate of an analogue object—usually result in the production of unstructured data, for example in the form of a digital image, sound or moving image file, consequently presenting a number of barriers to digital humanists.

In order to increase the utilisation of digitised and born-digital archives by digital humanists, it is essential that their contents and associated metadata are made available in a machine-readable format. Such “datafication” “…renders a diverse range of information as machine-readable, quantifiable data for the purpose of aggregation and analysis” (Southerton 2020 ). Digitisation is often a primary stage in datafication, yet as a process it remains distinct from datafication, which emerged with the growth of data analytics and big data over the past decade (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013 ). It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a detailed examination of datafication. However, it must be noted that the process of datafication has been critiqued as losing much qualitative detail of the source material (Southerton 2020 ), as perpetuating and subjecting new harms and discrimination upon already vulnerable communities (Noble 2018 ; Sutherland 2019 ), and as having “benefited governments, medical institutions, and corporations at the expense of citizens’ and consumers’ liberty and privacy” (Schüll 2020 , pp. 457), among other criticisms. On the other hand, Blanke and Prescott assert that datafication has particular significance for the humanities as it “suggests that for big data work unstructured data is not enough” ( 2016 , pp. 193). Michael Moss et al. suggest the key consequence of the move towards datafication for archives is that they have been transformed from a collection of administrative records into “a collection of data to be mined” (Moss et al. 2018 , pp. 120).

When engaged with critically, the datafication of digitised archives provides many new opportunities for digital humanists to make use of the vast quantity of archives digitised over the past two decades. However, making such heterogeneous and distributed digital data available in accordance with the FAIR Guiding Principles—that data be published as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable data (Wilkinson et al. 2016 )—is one of the major challenges facing the cultural heritage domain. Linked Data provides a viable means of archival datafication capable of implementing the FAIR Guiding Principles, creating machine-readable, interoperable, extensible Archival Linked Data suited to interrogation and analysis using digital humanities research methods. Using Linked Data, archival data (catalogue data, metadata, data extracted from the contents of born-digital and digitised archives) can be embedded into the web, enriching and further contextualising archival data, and making it easier to discover, access, and utilise.

Soon after the introduction of Linked Data, early case studies began to explore its potential application in the archives sector (Clough et al. 2011 ; Ruddock 2011 ). In the intervening decade, a substantial body of associated research has continued to develop examining the application of Linked Data to archives. Numerous published case studies are available, with Karen F. Gracy and Jinfang Niu providing some scholarly assessment. The majority of available literature principally focuses on the technical challenges posed by the production of Linked Data and the development of solutions to them. Critical engagement and assessment of Archival Linked Data is currently absent, and there has been little consideration of the benefits that Archival Linked Data offers to digital humanities research and scholarship, or of how it can increase utilisation of digitised or born-digital archives. In digital humanities scholarship, in contrast, there is growing evidence of how Linked Data specifically supports research. Over the past decade an increased adoption of Linked Data is evident in digital humanities scholarship, where it has been presented as a means of increasing the interoperability of digital cultural heritage data (Jordanous et al. 2012 ; Miyakita et al. 2018 ). Case studies provide evidence to suggest that Linked Data benefits the Digital Humanities in that it provides a viable means of publishing the digital data which fuels the Digital Humanities in the form of integrated, harmonised, and interoperable large-scale datasets which can be reused in multiple ways. However, notwithstanding that evidence, analysis of Linked Data and how it benefits the Digital Humanities remains limited.

Despite an evident growth of interest, Linked Data remains under-examined in both archival and digital humanities scholarship. Scholarly examination, has placed a heavy emphasis on the technical aspects—the “how” of Linked Data, but has given little consideration of the “why”, i.e. the benefits of Linked Data. This article begins to address this gap by examining how Archival Linked Data is beneficial for those engaged in digital humanities research and scholarship. In considering some of the barriers currently preventing digital humanists from being able to utilise digitised and born-digital archives, and suggesting the production of Archival Linked Data as part of interdisciplinary collaboration as a way forward, this article is a first step towards developing an understanding of the potential intersections between archival and digital humanities Linked Data scholarship and praxis.

It does this in four ways: first, after a very brief introduction to Linked Data, the article provides a snapshot of the Linked Data landscape in both archival and digital humanities scholarship. Secondly, extrapolating from archival scholarly, case-study, and practice-based literature, it details the benefits of Archival Linked Data which directly support increasing access to digitised archives for the purposes of digital humanities scholarship and practice. Thirdly, it examines some of the barriers currently preventing digital humanists from being able to take full advantage of the abundant potential of Archival Linked Data, and of utilising current digitised or datafied archives. Drawing these findings together, the author considers future directions of Archival Linked Data, including its role in processing and increasing access to born-digital archives, the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and low-barrier tools to scale up the production of Archival Linked Data, and increased collaboration between archival and digital humanities scholars and practitioners. This is a theoretical account; further research is needed to validate, through real-life application, the benefits of Linked Data for the purposes of digital humanities scholarship. In particular, examination of how the technological and structural barriers highlighted here are actually affecting the critical work of, for example, a national archive institution, and identification of the changes and developments necessary to ensure the progress of digital scholarship dependent on Linked Data, would be especially valuable contributions to current scholarship and practice.

Linked Data

First conceived in 2006 as the building blocks of the Semantic Web, Linked Data is most simply described as a “set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web” (Bizer et al. 2009 , pp. 1). Whereas the Web is based upon documents (e.g. web pages) being linked to other documents, the Semantic Web is structured in the form of semantically defined data linked to other data, known as Linked Data. Linked Data itself is not a specific technology or tool, rather it is a set of principles for publishing structured data which underpin the creation of interoperable machine-readable data on the Semantic Web. The Linked Data Principles state:

Use URIs [Unique Resource Identifiers] as names for things

Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names

When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF [Resource Description Framework], SPARQL [SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language])

Include links to other URIs so that they [people and intelligent Semantic Web agents] can discover more things (Berners-Lee 2006 )

Linked Data is structured in the form of triples as subject-predicate-object, whereby the predicate semantically defines the relationship between the two entities. By using unique identifiers, standardised ontologies and vocabularies, large, interconnected networks of these entities and their relationships are created, which can be represented in the form of a knowledge graph.

The Linked Data principles were followed up in 2010 by the 5 Star Linked Open Data Scheme which incorporated the Open Knowledge Foundation’s definition of Open Data as that which “can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone for any purpose” (Open Knowledge Foundation (ND) 2021 ). The 5 Star Scheme defines a sliding scale of the fundamental technical and accessibility requirements of Linked Data as it moves towards becoming Linked Open Data: data which is available on the web (1*), as machine-readable structured data (2*), in a non-proprietary format (3*), using standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (RDF and SPARQL) (4*), and linked to other Linked Open Data (5*) (Berners-Lee 2010 ). This article has adopted the term Linked Data to refer collectively to Linked Data that is published under an open licence (i.e. Linked Open Data) and that which is not. A distinction has only been maintained when discussing individual case studies where the language of the author(s) has been used, and for resources which include Linked Open Data in their title. For an in depth introduction to Linked Data see Gracy 2015 (Fig. 1 ).

A simple knowledge graph

Archives and Linked Data

The year 2011, five years after Tim Berners-Lee’s first articulation of the Linked Data Principles, is a significant turning point in the emergence of interest in Linked Data within the archives sector. Although the Library of Congress published authority files as RDF triples in 2008 (Summers et al. 2008 ), it was in 2011 that reports on the potential uses and benefits of Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums first emerged (Isaac et al. 2011 ; Keller et al. 2011 ). The same year saw the publication of the first complete datasets of bibliographic Linked Data—the British Library’s British National Bibliography, and Oslo Public Library Linked Data (Godby et al. 2015 ; Rekkavik 2014 )—and early articles reporting on archives-specific Linked Data projects, such as research at the UK National Archives on geo-location referencing (2009–2011) and the LOCAH (Linked Open COPAC and Archives Hub) project (2010–2011) (Clough et al. 2011 ; Ruddock 2011 ). One of the first archival instances of a Linked Data dataset derived from the LOCAH Project, which published a subset of archival metadata taken from the Archives Hub, an archival metadata aggregator, together with bibliographic data from Copac (Consortium of Online Public Access Catalogues) (Ruddock 2011 ). Through identifying a number of challenges that the project team was facing, including issues of sustainability, maintenance of provenance, and lack of standardisation of archival data, the LOCAH project raised awareness of the specific barriers facing archive services in the adoption of Linked Data. On the other hand, it also made clear the numerous benefits which Linked Data could bring—including integration with other data sources, the facilitation of serendipitous search, and the creation of flexible entry points to archival data, thereby increasing the exposure of collections.

Interest has continued to grow over the following decade, as evidenced by the plethora of published case studies now available. These case studies generally fall into one of three categories. Firstly, those which develop Archival Linked Data infrastructure, such as gazetteers (Clough et al. 2011 ), mark-up schemas (Dobreski et al. 2019 ; Gartner 2015 ), tools and workflows (Pattuelli et al. 2013 ; Stevenson 2012a ) and ontologies (Corn and Patrick 2019 ; Llanes-Padrón and Pastor-Sánchez 2017 ; Robledano-Arillo et al. 2020). Most notable in this category is the ontology of the International Council on Archives’ latest standard for archival description, Records in Contexts, which has been presented as the Linked Data ontology, RiC-O (Pitti and Stockting 2016 ). The second category, which is most common, is those which enhance discrete pre-existing collections of archival metadata and publish them as Linked Data, including for the Historical Archive of the European Commission (Damova 2020 ), the Zeri Photo Archive (Daquino et al. 2017 ), and the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s Archives (Rademaker et al. 2015 ).

In the third category are new digital archival resources made available via Linked Data web services and user interfaces. An early example is the Online Digital Archive of Architectural Practice in Post-War Queensland, a digital archive providing a comprehensive online resource of oral history interviews—supplemented with items from related archive and library collections (Hunter et al. 2012 ). The case study identified a number of benefits of adopting Linked Data in the development of digital archives, providing evidence that benefits can be experienced equally by archive services, their key stakeholders, and users. The Linked Jazz project created a Linked Open Data dataset of over two thousand jazz musicians extracted from oral history interviews (Pattuelli et al. 2013 , 2015 , 2017 ). The dataset is available via a network visualisation tool which enables analysis of the professional and social relationships between individual musicians. Linked Jazz presented a convincing argument to support further investment in Archival Linked Data: “As the amount of digital cultural heritage data continues to grow at an exponential rate, there is a call for new strategies and applications to enhance their discovery, interpretation, and use. The application of LOD [Linked Open Data] technology to cultural heritage content holds enormous potential to answer this call” (Pattuelli et al. 2013 , pp. 6) (see Fig. 2 ).

Linked Jazz project by the Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute—network visualisation tool (CC BY)

Archival scholars examining Linked Data include Gracy’s analysis of the opportunities and challenges of implementing Linked Data ( 2015 ), and experiments using Linked Data to increase access to library metadata for music resources and moving image archive metadata (Gracy et al. 2013 , 2018 ). By developing crosswalks between datasets, Gracy has also provided tools for the implementation of Linked Data, and made a number of recommendations to overcome the challenges associated with the processes involved ( 2015 ). Niu’s scholarly overview of early trends in archival Linked Data practice revealed that the majority of projects up to 2015 had primarily converted existing descriptions. Furthermore, she found that the implementation of Linked Data significantly changes archival description, and argued that many of the methods of accessing Linked Data are beyond the capabilities of, what she terms, “generic users” of archives (Niu 2016 ).

The Digital Humanities and Linked Data

As is the case in archival scholarship, the trend in digital humanities Linked Data scholarship has been for individual case studies. Writing in 2012, the authors of a case study using Semantic Web techniques to enrich TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) encoded manuscripts, argued that “the benefits of semantic web techniques are currently under-explored in Digital Humanities research”, positioning Linked Data as a solution to data being made available but not interoperable (Jordanous et al. 2012 , pp. 44). Since then, case studies have demonstrated how various digital humanities research methods can be combined with Linked Data to support research in a range of disciplines, including Linguistics (Chiarcos et al. 2018 ; Cimiano et al. 2020 ), Literary Studies (Egloff and Picca 2020 ; García et al. 2016 ), Music (Eyharabide et al. 2019 ), and Digital History (Balado et al. 2015 ; Blanke and Riechert 2020 ; Bruneau et al. 2021 ; Horne 2020 ; Hyvönen et al. 2016 ; Miyakita et al. 2018 ; Romein et al. 2020 ; Tamper et al. 2018 ).

Of particular relevance, are the case studies combining digital humanities methods with digital cultural heritage data; as a recent overview has argued: “Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies are becoming increasingly important in creating, publishing, and analysing Cultural Heritage data in Digital Humanities” (Bikakis et al. 2021 , pp. 166). Earlier case studies focused on creating a discrete Linked Data dataset and examining the links between data within the dataset, or with a specific external dataset. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms project, for example, created a digital edition of Greek and Arabic collections of ancient wise sayings using RDF. The project demonstrated the value of incorporating Linked Data into the process of producing online scholarly editions marked up using the TEI XML format, and identified advantages of that approach for digital humanists wishing to create similar digital editions, or to analyse the data in resulting datasets (Jordanous et al. 2012 ). The Dutch Ships and Sailors project developed and evaluated a method for identifying links between ships in two datasets, a dataset of Dutch maritime events, the “Northern Muster Rolls database”, and the historical newspaper archive of the Dutch National Library (Balado et al. 2015 ). The project combined machine learning techniques with manual assessment to identify links between the two datasets, proving not only the possibility of retrieving a considerable amount of relevant links between the two datasets, but also that the links provided new opportunities for analysis of the source datasets.

However, as more and more interoperable datasets have become available, an increasing number of studies have focused on the development of tools, user interfaces, and web services to allow for the access of Linked Data from multiple sources without the need for advanced technical expertise (Baierer et al. 2017 ; Egloff and Picca 2020 ; Hoekstra et al. 2016 ; Miyakita et al. 2018 ; Sztyler et al. 2014 ; Xia et al. 2018 ). A key example is DIVE, a Linked Data digital cultural heritage collection browser which uses historical events and narratives as the context for searching, browsing, and providing access to objects from heterogeneous collections (de Boer et al. 2015 ). A particularly well-known example is WarSampo—Finnish Second World War on the Semantic Web, an initiative which integrated nineteen distributed datasets relating to Finland in the Second World War as Linked Open Data, and created the WarSampo Data for Digital Humanities Linked Open Data service to enable research and the creation of applications related to war history (Hyvönen et al. 2016 ; Koho et al. 2021 ). Additionally, the initiative has developed the WarSampo Portal to provide access to those without Linked Data skills, enabling search and browsing based on originally six, and subsequently increased to nine, different “perspectives”, including event, place, person, casualty, and army unit (Hyvönen et al. 2016 ; Koho et al. 2021 ). WarSampo has transformed and harmonised previously isolated datasets to form a unified and extensible knowledge graph which enables queries that were hitherto impossible, including presenting biographies for individual soldiers and histories of military units (Koho et al. 2016 , 2021 ) (see Fig. 3 ).

WarSampo Finnish Second World War on the Semantic Web—faceted search interface (CC BY)

Indeed, Finland has become a key centre in developing and investing in the Linked Open Data infrastructure required to provide access to digital cultural heritage data for the purposes of the Digital Humanities. To date this has included the development of an ontology service, Linked Data publishing platform, and various cultural heritage Semantic Web portals (Hyvönen 2020a ). These portals, including BiographySampo, BookSampo, CultureSampo, NameSampo, TravelSampo and the above-mentioned multi-award winning WarSampo, have been accessed by millions of end-users, including specialist digital humanities scholars, genealogists and the general public (Hyvönen 2020a ; Hyvönen et al. 2019 ; Koho et al. 2016 , 2021 ). The Sampo portals, together with a number of other case studies, clearly demonstrate that investment in Linked Data tools and services for the Digital Humanities benefits users in general, and aids the development of cultural heritage applications more widely (Blanke and Riechert 2020 ; de Boer et al. 2015 ; Hyvönen 2020a ; b ; Hyvönen et al. 2016 ; Koho et al. 2021 ; Oldman et al. 2016 ; Tamper et al. 2018 ).

The benefits of Archival Linked Data for Digital Humanities scholarship

Whereas digital humanities scholarship demonstrates an interest in, and awareness of, the value of Archival Linked Data for the Digital Humanities, there has been little similar consideration of its value, and its benefits, within archival scholarship—this despite the fact that, at least in one instance, inspiration for the project came directly from the Digital Humanities to the archive sector. In a study developing a Linked Data informed ontology for the description of Spanish Civil War photographic archives, the authors acknowledged that the context of their research was partially informed by “the transformations in the organization of documentary collections spurred by the digital humanities” (Robledano-Arillo et al. 2019 , pp. 67). However, the aim of the study itself was directed to supporting historians using traditional research methods in accessing photographs for iconographic research. Beyond this, there are some general suggestions that in processing large datasets, revealing relationships across heterogeneous sources, and enabling access to unstructured data, Archival Linked Data offers opportunities for digital humanities research (Bones 2019 ; Pattuelli et al. 2017 ). However, what exactly these opportunities and benefits are remains under-examined.

Notwithstanding the lack of explicit investigation of the benefits of Archival Linked Data for the Digital Humanities, it is evident that many of the benefits of Linked Data to archive services, their collections, and users which have been articulated from within the archival sector are especially advantageous to the Digital Humanities. Archival Linked Data meets the needs of digital humanists in that it provides interoperable, reusable, and integrated data. However, in making archival data machine-readable, connecting disparate and cross-disciplinary datasets, and revealing previously unknown relationships across collections, the benefits of Archival Linked Data for digital humanities scholarship extend much further, and deserve to be much more clearly articulated across the disciplines.

Within archival scholarship, the literature contains multiple examples of Archival Linked Data’s relevance and value to the Digital Humanities community. Improvements in knowledge discovery, information search and retrieval greatly benefits digital humanists due to improved effectiveness, efficiency, and precision (Llanes-Padrón and Pastor-Sánchez 2017 ; McKenna et al. 2018 ; Rademaker et al. 2015 ; Robledano-Arillo et al. 2019 ). More complex queries can be accommodated through the use of SPARQL. With a single SPARQL query, searches can be made across multiple collections, and navigation across cultural heritage and non-cultural heritage sources of data is made possible (Gracy 2015 ; Gracy et al. 2013 ; McKenna et al. 2018 ). Linked Data makes it easier to reuse, align and enrich archival data (Pitti et al. 2016 ), and integrate it with data derived from other sources (Clough et al. 2011 ; Gracy 2015 ; Hunter et al. 2012 ; Niu 2016 ; Pattuelli et al. 2017 ). In this way, the data cleaning and harmonisation processes which occupy a significant part of any digital humanities research that brings together data from multiple sources are made redundant. However, it must be noted that this is in large part due to these processes having already been undertaken in the production of Linked Data, and which constitute one of the most time-consuming aspects of the process (Davis 2019 ). Linked Data pushes archival data closer to the individual user, allowing them to more efficiently access data for their specific applications (Debruyne et al. 2016 ; Rademaker et al. 2015 ), and to navigate seamlessly between datasets (Baierer et al. 2017 ; Clough et al. 2011 ; McKenna et al. 2018 ). In accommodating multiple search methods, Linked Data enables different search methods to be made available to meet the needs of digital humanists with a range of technical abilities and research interests. These include SPARQL endpoints, entity, semantic concept or keyword search, browsing and exploration, and serendipitous search.

As a machine-readable format, Linked Data is capable of supporting automatic reasoning and analysis of semantic data, querying large volumes of data, and offering new methods for discovery, engagement, interpretation, and use. Web-based user interfaces often incorporate tools which facilitate new methods of engagement and analysis, and “allow the use of archival data in ways that a few years ago were unimaginable or prohibitively difficult to do for both social and technological reasons” (Pitti et al. 2016 , pp. 176). Adopting Linked Data creates a digital research environment ideal for digital humanists, opening up archival data to natively digital methods, and supporting dynamic research methods (Gartner 2015 ; McKenna et al. 2018 ). Furthermore, Linked Data extends the depth and breadth of archival analysis possible as it can be interrogated through, for example, graphical interfaces, data or text mining, data clustering, information visualisation, network analysis, natural language processing (NLP), and named entity recognition (NER), many of which digital methods are commonly employed in the Digital Humanities.

The process of integrating archival datasets and making them interoperable increases the quality of the data made available for the Digital Humanities as it is necessary to adhere to cross-domain standards and links are created across sources of data. Improvements in quality are manifold: archival data is richer, more expressive and granular, and semantically enriched (Browell 2016 ; Gartner 2015 ; Gracy et al. 2013 ; Niu 2016; Pattuelli et al. 2013 ; Pitti et al. 2016 ). The integration and harmonisation of heterogeneous sources of data facilitates automatic reasoning, providing the ability to generate new knowledge and infer additional implicit facts from those explicitly documented (Damova 2020 ; Tillman 2016 ). Archival data is also enriched through incorporating knowledge derived from both users and experts. Users can add their own knowledge to archival description through the incorporation of user-generated description into Linked Data datasets with activities such as semantic tagging and other user annotations (Gracy 2015 ; Niu 2016 ). Collection descriptions are enhanced through the provision of additional archival data, such as further descriptive, contextual, and authority data which might be internal administrative data not previously publicly available, or data drawn from external sources (Gartner 2015 ; Gracy 2015 , 2018 ). Data is, therefore, better contextualised by it not being presented in isolation, enabling digital humanists to more easily gain a fuller understanding of archival data.

Current barriers to Digital Humanities scholarship

The challenges of producing and publishing Archival Linked Data are relatively well documented, and include technological issues, a prevalence of unstructured and not easily disambiguated data, a lack of financial and skilled human resources, low-levels of awareness of Linked Data within the profession, and an absence of an Archival Linked Data infrastructure, including tools, standards and best practice (Gracy 2018 ; Hyvönen 2012 ; McKenna et al. 2018 ; Smith-Yoshimura 2018 ). Challenges for which both archival and digital humanities scholars and practitioners share an impetus in finding a solution include: balancing the provision of access to open data with the maintenance of Intellectual Property Rights (Gartner 2015 ; McKenna et al. 2018 ), preventing the decontextualisation and loss of nuance of archives (Gartner 2015 ; Gracy 2018 ), and providing access without complicating the user search process (Niu 2016 ). As the growing body of case studies has demonstrated, many challenges can be overcome with the maturation of Archival Linked Data practices. Moreover, recent large-scale projects have begun to deliver some of the fundamental infrastructure required for engagement with the production of Archival Linked Data en masse. These projects include the development of an international archives sector Linked Data ontology, RiC-O, already referred to above, and, as part of the UK Towards a National Collection project, investigation of the infrastructure required for the creation and maintenance of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) in the UK heritage sector, and exploration of Linked Open Data, knowledge graphs, and AI as a means of making connections between online representations of heritage objects and information about them. Footnote 1

It is clear that Archival Linked Data provides valuable advantages for digital humanists wishing to interrogate digitised archives. However, Linked Data is far from a panacea to the challenges of accessing the contents of digitised archives, and their associated metadata, as data. To date, Archival Linked Data is a minor player on the Linked Data scene. Furthermore, even though more is being contributed year on year, it is still a statistically insignificant proportion of existing digital archival data globally. In addition to this limited availability of archival data as Linked Data, a key hindrance to the success of Archival Linked Data for the purposes of digital humanities scholarship is the current lack of relevant archival and non-archival Linked Data datasets with which archival data can be interconnected and augmented.

The Linked Open Data Cloud provides a visualisation of all datasets currently available as Linked Open Data (i.e. as RDF, linked via URIs to other datasets, and with open access to the entire dataset) and the links between them. Composed (as at May 2021), of 1,301 datasets, it is dominated by datasets from the life sciences, linguistics and governmental data. At the centre of the Cloud are DBpedia Footnote 2 and Wikidata, Footnote 3 two crowd-sourced Linked Data datasets created as part of Wikimedia Foundation projects, and GeoNames, a multilingual geographical database. Footnote 4 Archival and bibliographic datasets are mostly included in the Publications Subdomain where key datasets include VIAF (the Virtual Internet Authority File), Footnote 5 which links to twenty-eight other datasets, the Library of Congress Subject Headings which is linked to twenty-seven datasets, Footnote 6 and the European digital cultural heritage metadata aggregator Europeana, which links to six. Footnote 7 A number of Archival Linked Data datasets are included, such as the National Digital Data Archive of Hungary, Footnote 8 the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Footnote 9 and the 20th Century Press Archives. Footnote 10 The former two datasets link to both DBpedia and VIAF, among others, while the latter links to DBpedia and GeoNames. Such Archival Linked Data datasets confirm the possibility of building meaningful connections between Archival Linked Data and other Linked Data datasets, thus providing impetus for the addition of further Archival Linked Data to the Linked Open Data Cloud.

However, available Linked Data datasets present a number of challenges when identifying relevant datasets which correspond to, and can enrich, digitised archives, partially as a result of the fragmented transnational and corporate infrastructures affecting the scope of datasets and their recorded information. One dataset which illustrates many of these issues is, GeoNames, a commonly used digital gazetteer in both archival and digital humanities Linked Data activity requiring historic geographic data. GeoNames integrates global geographic data and makes it available as Linked Data, including place names in multiple languages, latitude and longitude coordinates, and current population statistics. Although this is undoubtedly useful information for, say, the mapping of historic data, it provides little contextual information of relevance to historic places and spaces. Similarly, trying to integrate person-centred historic data is also not straightforward. VIAF is limited to information about published authors; Wikimedia Foundation projects are governed by a notability test which requires people to be considered “worthy of notice”, “significant”, or “remarkable” to warrant inclusion (Wikipedia 2021 ). Such requirements led to pages created to document enslaved people owned by Martha and George Washington at Dogue Run Farm not being published by Wikipedia due to an absence of relevant published source material (Herbert and Parilla 2021 ). It is clear, therefore, for the majority of individuals documented in digitised historical archives—who may be peasants or workers, prisoners or wives and mothers—little or no related content is available as Linked Data. As well as resulting in links only being possible between a limited number of individuals, the narrow scope of these key Linked Data datasets risks prolonging the privileging of a minority of “notable” individuals captured in the now digitised historic record, further marginalising historically excluded communities.

Fortunately, relevant digital data is available. The collections of digitised archives made accessible as a result of mass digitisation projects provide almost limitless potential for the Digital Humanities. Often driven by the needs of family historians for sources of names, census records, vital records (birth, death, marriage), title deeds, wills, and many other record types have been digitised and made publicly available in the form of digital images, and/or data, created through indexing and the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The inadequacy of these approaches to digitisation for the purposes of the Digital Humanities, however, are captured by Sonia Ranade, who, reflecting on the digitisation work of the UK National Archives, states.

In early digitisation projects, our emphasis (and that of most other archival institutions) was facilitation of remote access, creating digitised assets with the assumption that these will be consumed in much the same way that an on-site researcher reads a paper file. In effect, our traditional digitisation activities deliver a “picture” of the page, alongside some limited indexing. We have found that digitised resources created in this way do not readily lend themselves to computational analysis and we are beginning to realise that our established approach to digitisation does little to facilitate innovative use of the records. (Ranade 2016 , pp. 3264).

Furthermore, increased commercialisation of the digitisation of archives has left much of this vast resource of potential data trapped behind the paywalls of academic publishers and commercial genealogy companies. Such commercialisation has not only dictated the types of record prioritised for digitisation, it has also influenced how the resulting data is formatted. For example, trying to meet the demand of genealogists has led to the publication of data in forms which enable search for individuals, rather than the examination of total populations (Morris 2017 ).

Through datafication, the potential of this largely untapped resource could be released, opening up digitised archives to digital methods of interaction, interrogation, and analysis. A number of large-scale projects have demonstrated the value of datafying digitised archives to form large databases combing digitised archives from multiple sources, with notable examples from the UK including University College London’s Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, which created the online Encyclopaedia of British Slave-ownership, Footnote 11 and People of Medieval Scotland, which has created a database of named individuals drawn from over 8,600 documents covering the period 1093–1371. Footnote 12 One key example is the Digital Panopticon, a cross-institutional and international digital humanities collaboration, which has created a database relating to people sentenced at the London Old Bailey between 1780 and 1875. Footnote 13 The project brought together genealogical, biometric, and criminal justice datasets held by multiple organisations based in the UK and Australia. The project also created new digital archival datasets by digitising and datafying further historic records, manually combining and harmonising digitised archives from multiple sources. The problem with the creation of such databases is that, neither open nor connected to external data, such databases are commonly structured as relational databases and provide only mediated access via a bespoke search tool, often developed specifically for the project. Frequently, such databases do not provide access to the underlying data, limiting its exploitation to within the parameters defined by the original project. Furthermore, when made available for download, considerable data-cleaning and harmonisation is required to enable integration with other datasets. The addition of such a wealth of data to the Linked Open Data Cloud would be a major boon far beyond digital humanists.

From this perspective, then, there are a number of obstacles to overcome, and there currently seems to be little viable alternative to the commercial model of mass digitisation. Furthermore, Thomas Padilla points to the role that cultural heritage organisations play in “enclosing” their own data through commercial partnerships, questioning “Is it worth boosting the cost of admission to an enclosed garden that weakens the library community and inhibits emerging forms of research”? ( 2018 , pp. 297). One way forward might be individual projects negotiating free access with commercial providers to subsets of their data, as was the case of the Digital Panopticon which negotiated free access to aspects of the key genealogical data held by their commercial providers, Findmypast and Ancestry. Indeed, the impact of access restrictions to digitised archives on Archival Linked Data activity can be seen from the Irish Record Linkage 1864–1913 project which used digitised archives and data provided by the General Register Office “under strict terms and conditions” which limited access only to the project team (Debruyne et al. 2016 , pp. 160). While such a compromise is far from the ideal solution—in the case of the Digital Panopticon, subscriptions are still required for full access to the transcriptions and digitised images from which the data has been extracted—the partnership model of digitisation funding, from commercial partners, internal funding, and grant funding, has become a relatively common one.

Future directions of Archival Linked Data?

Engagement with Linked Data has come a long way over the past ten years in both archival and digital humanities scholarship and practice. The previous review has indicated how, to date, Archival Linked Data case studies have focused primarily on increasing access to archival metadata or, more rarely, digitised archives, and a number of barriers remain to making a significant proportion of these materials available as Linked Data. Digital humanities case studies have focused on increasing the accessibility of Archival Linked Data and the development of tools for access and analysis. However, those currently available are yet to accommodate the wide range of digital humanities research topics and methods required (Hyvönen 2020b ). Resolving the challenges of making digitised archives both available and accessible as Linked Data are complex. It not only requires technological developments and mass investment in the production of Linked Data by multiple sectors, but also a change in attitude towards data being open and freely available (within legal limits), in addition to an infrastructure that enables this. The FAIR Guiding Principles can aid the cultural heritage domain move in this direction and are highly compatible with Linked Data. Guidelines for the application of these principles to the digital objects and metadata held by libraries, archives and museums have been proposed, including the use of PIDs, standardised metadata formats, and external-links (Koster and Woutersen-Windhouwer 2018 ).

Significantly, digitised archives are only one category of the digital archives currently available. The exponential growth of the creation of born-digital records since the 1990s is set to vastly increase the volume of born-digital archives. The huge volume of digital archives requires archivists to no longer consider archives as texts to be read but as collections of data, for which new methods and tools are required to undertake a reformed approach to appraisal (Moss et al. 2018 ). While progress has been made in the preservation and provision of access to born-digital archives it has not been rapid enough: “born-digital archives are endangered archives, and we urgently need to preserve these collections, make them available and produce new knowledge… It is astonishing that email and born-digital archives are still treated as a new thing that few archivists really understand” (Jaillant 2019 , pp. 300). Moreover, traditional search methods based on free-form natural language search are ineffective in exploring large born-digital collections (Winters and Prescott 2019 ). The potential of Linked Data as a means of making born-digital archives available as collections of data, accessible to multiple users and research methods, warrants further investigation. Lucy McKenna, in a paper presented at the AURA Workshop, suggested the benefits of Linked Data for born-digital archives included improved knowledge discovery, seamless navigation, and increased awareness of available resources in digital archives ( 2020 ). Whereas it is likely that many of the practices for the creation and provision of access to Archival Linked Data originating from digitised archives will be transferable to the context of born-digital archives, there will inevitably be some areas of difference and additional challenges. Linked Open Data is preferable for the purposes of digital humanists, yet the format is not always appropriate for archives where restrictions relating to sensitivity, confidentiality, data protection, and Intellectual Property Rights are not uncommon. Such restrictions are especially prevalent in born-digital archives and have resulted in a vast amount of born-digital archives currently being preserved but not made available for access. Tools to combat these challenges are beginning to emerge, particularly for use with email collections (Jaillant 2019 ; Ries and Palkó 2019 ; Schneider et al. 2019 ). For example, ePADD, an open-source software developed by Stanford Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives, incorporates machine learning and natural language processing to screen email collections for sensitive and legally restricted information, prepare emails for preservation, and make them discoverable and accessible to users (Schneider et al. 2019 ). As a recent editorial argued, while it is essential that the preservation of born-digital records is accelerated, “we also need to push for access to these archives through lobbying for open data respectful of privacy” (Jaillant 2019 , pp. 301). One approach to this has been demonstrated by the 20th Century Press Archives which donated a large Linked Data dataset to Wikidata in 2019. By publishing only the metadata created by the 20th Century Press Archives under an open licence (CC0), the organisation found a way of contributing data regarding archives with access restrictions to the Linked Open Data cloud—providing a controlled level of access to their contents—while continuing to uphold the intellectual property rights to the original material (Neubert 2019 ). Linked Data, both that which is open and “closed” (i.e. made available with access and/or use restrictions), offers an as yet under-explored potential to be part of the solution to the challenge of providing some level of access to born-digital archives while maintaining certain restrictions.

Despite the scale of these challenges, the expertise of archivists and other cultural heritage professionals has an important role to play in overcoming the issues currently preventing the widespread adoption of Linked Data in the archives sector (McKenna et al. 2018 ). Even while the necessary infrastructure remains absent for the production, provision of access to, maintenance, and preservation of Archival Linked Data, archivists can make a significant contribution at an institutional or individual level. By increasing their own knowledge of Linked Data, and improving institutional awareness and preparedness for Archival Linked Data, archive services will be well placed to embrace Archival Linked Data when it becomes a more feasible prospect. Investing in data cleaning and standardisation, and exploring low-barrier means of contributing archival data as Linked Data, such as Wikidata, are achievable first steps for many archive services which can have a considerable impact on increasing access to high-quality archival data and ensuring its future interoperability.

The adoption of Linked Data in the archives sector is still a relatively new phenomenon and is open to expansion and development in multiple directions. In the library sector, a number of reports have been published in recent years concerning and advocating the use of Wikipedia and Wikidata (Association of Research Libraries 2019 ; International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions 2017 ; Program for Cooperative Cataloguing 2018 ). The library sector’s increasing engagement with Wikimedia Foundation projects may prophesize a future development of Archival Linked Data infrastructure. In providing a low-barrier entry to the Linked Data environment capable of scaling-up Linked Data adoption, Wikidata may prove a key tool in overcoming some of the outstanding infrastructural challenges. Cultural heritage institutions which have drawn in authority data from Wikidata to their datasets and reciprocally contributed their data to Wikimedia Foundation projects include the National Galleries of Scotland (Gould 2018 ), Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) (Romeo 2016 ), the Library of Congress (Thornton 2017 ), and WorldCat (Proffitt 2020 ). The advantages of making cultural heritage data freely accessible via Wikidata are clearly demonstrated by the Smithsonian’s experience: the amount of views of an identical image is on average 1000 times higher on Wikipedia than on the Smithsonian’s own web pages (Kapsalis 2019 ).

The increasing attention given to AI in both the Digital Humanities and archival scholarship (as elsewhere) suggests a further future direction of Archival Linked Data development. In both disciplines, engagement with AI to support scholarship and practice is in its infancy. While a detailed examination of current research falls beyond the scope of this article we can note that machine learning techniques have already been explored in a number of Archival Linked Data case-studies, including natural language processing, and its subfield, named entity recognition (Clough et al. 2011 ; Damova 2020 ; Pattuelli et al. 2015 ; Rademaker et al. 2015 ). It can be supposed that, in automating processes, and making the production of Archival Linked Data less resource intensive, other sub-fields of AI, such as deep learning, computer vision, and neural networks, also offer much potential for the archives sector to scale up the production of Linked Data and innovate how it is accessed. Furthermore, AI has been suggested to offer a potential solution to the challenge of providing controlled access to unstructured data originating from both catalogues and digitised archives (Schreur 2020 ), and to enable the development of analytical tools meeting the particular and multifaceted requirements of digital humanists requiring access to digital cultural heritage data (Hyvönen 2020b ). Drawing on Leopoldina Fortunati’s prediction of the increasing “robotization” of the domestic sphere due to the rapid acceptance and incorporation of automated and/or robotic systems into daily life ( 2018 ), it is as yet unclear to what extent the datafication of archives will evolve into the robotisation of archives with the increased incorporation of AI into archival processes.

Regardless, AI cannot be seen as a silver bullet to reducing the resource intensiveness of the production of Archival Linked Data; there will always be aspects of the production workflow which will not be scalable and human intervention will remain essential. Regardless of how AI is incorporated into the workflow for the production or provision of access to Archival Linked Data, it is essential that any engagement is undertaken critically, with attention directed not only towards its utilisation, but also to its limitations, biases, and ethical implications. Such a conversation is beginning, for example in Jenny Bunn’s exploration of engaging with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) from a recordkeeping perspective (Bunn 2020 ), and in the examination of four Australian AI case studies to assess the implications of AI for archives (Rolan et al. 2019 ). Much remains to be addressed, however, and the recent flourishing of archival research networks investigating AI, such as the AEOLIAN Network (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations), AURA Network (Archives in the UK/Republic of Ireland and AI), and HAIRA (the Hub for Artificial Intelligence Research in Archives), hints at future progress.

Moss et al. have argued that the move to the digital environment necessitates archive services working collaboratively with other organisations, suggesting web archives, newspaper archives, and data archives as key collaborators (2018). Collaboration is vital for the successful scaling up of the production of Archival Linked Data and the development of tools to make it accessible and interrogable to digital humanists and other users. Furthermore, increasing collaboration across cultural heritage, with other professional sectors and academic disciplines has been widely cited as a key benefit of adopting Linked Data in the archives sector (Llanes-Padrón and Pastor-Sánchez 2017 ; McKenna et al. 2018 ; Pitti et al. 2016 ; vander Sande et al. 2018 ), with some pointing to increased collaboration as a means of increasing the sustainability of archival Linked Data projects (Martins et al. 2021 ). Despite evidence of cross-institutional collaboration within Archival Linked Data activity, such collaboration has to date mainly been confined to between multiple cultural heritage institutions and Higher Education Institutes (Smith-Yoshimura 2018 ). Assessing the success of the Linking Lives project in 2012, Jane Stevenson of the UK Higher Education Archives Hub concluded by pondering: “Maybe we’ve reached the point in the Linked Data story where we need to focus more strongly on how it will answer the requirements of researchers…Surely we need a more collaborative approach that draws in the technical people, the information professionals and the researchers” ( 2012b ). Even though the value and necessity of engaging with users of archives when developing and introducing new technologies was made clear by the LEADERS project, which centralised users in its early exploration of archival engagement with the World Wide Web (Sexton et al. 2004 ), it has yet to become commonplace in Archival Linked Data activity.

The Digital Humanities is an inherently interdisciplinary and collaborative field that is information and data-driven, and requires access to large-scale digital datasets. Digital humanists use a range of digital methods, and have a demonstrable interest in, and impetus for, making archival data more digitally accessible. On the other hand, Hannah Lee provided a convincing argument for how archivists, and others in Library and Information Sciences, could apply their skills and methods to support digital humanities research by better connecting information to its users ( 2017 ). There is, therefore, a natural synergy between digital humanists and archival scholars and practitioners which should be exploited to increase the production of, and advocate for investment in, Archival Linked Data. Whereas collaboration between digital humanists and archives professionals to increase the availability of relevant Linked Data datasets would be mutually beneficial in increasing access to digitised archives, cross-sectoral and inter-disciplinary collaboration is also essential to support research on born-digital collections “in order to enable GLAM institutions, institutional networks and infrastructures to develop their born-digital collections in meaningful ways, improve preservation formats, curation workflows, repositories, services and access for researchers” (Ries and Palkó 2019 , pp. 4). Calls for such a collaboration are not new—writing in 2013 Matthew Kirschenbaum outlined how archivists and digital humanists need each other: “Digital archivists need digital humanities researchers and subject experts to  use born-digital collections …Digital humanists need the long-term perspective on data that archivists have…Digital archivists and digital humanists need common and interoperable digital tools…Digital humanists need the collections expertise of digital archivists…Digital archivists need cyberinfrastructure” ( 2013 , para 38). The potential outcomes of such a collaboration are demonstrated by the work of the Shanghai Library which has undertaken a number of digital humanities projects using Linked Data, resulting in the creation of large-scale datasets drawing together archival data from multiple sources. The creation of the Chinese Genealogy Knowledge Service Platform (or Jiapu) is one example which demonstrates how the application of digital humanities methods to digitised archives, in combination with Linked Data, can bring about transformative benefits to users more widely and open up digitised archives to multiple uses: “The Jiapu platform has transformed the ways of accessing genealogy information from providing scanned images to expanding users’ ability to dig deep…The user group has expanded to include scholars for research, the public to find their ancestors, and institutions and developers to create applications by using the linked data from the platform” (Xia and Bao 2020 , pp. 81).

Mass investment in digitisation over the past two decades has created a vast resource of digitised archives of varying levels of accessibility. Those which have been subjected to further datafication are more fully accessible for utilisation by digital humanists than those made available only as digital surrogates, and are ripe for further exploitation using digital methods. Linked Data provides a viable means of making digitised and born-digital archives more accessible, producing integrated, enriched, and interoperable large-scale archival datasets available for reuse in multiple ways. To date, the publication of archival metadata as Linked Data has been the key concern of Archival Linked Data activity. However, it is the contents of born-digital and digitised records which offer the greatest potential to researchers, making it increasingly necessary for archive services to datafy their collections. A shared appreciation of and desire for the provision of access to archives in digital forms and as data suggests that collaboration with digital humanists would be especially fruitful to both the Digital Humanities and the archives sector. Digital humanists could prove a key ally in advocating for Archival Linked Data, demonstrating how it benefits the users of archives, and ensuring that it continues to do so.

The infrastructure required to scale up Archival Linked Data, including standards, best practice, and tools for the creation, maintenance, preservation, and provision of access, are beginning to emerge. Low-barrier, non-sector-specific tools, such as Wikidata, and the use of machine learning and other AI techniques to further automate aspects of the production of Archival Linked Data are on the horizon. Such developments are essential to move beyond individual case studies, expand the sources of archival data being published as Archival Linked Data, and move its production further beyond research institutions in the global north. In the meantime, there are steps that archivists can take on an individual level to prepare themselves and their institutions for engagement with Linked Data when it is more feasible to do so and for progressing their data further up the 5* Linked Open Data Scheme.

The digital environment has forced archival scholars and practitioners to adopt new attitudes to records and archives, viewing them as data, as well as information and records, and to develop a new suite of tools and approaches to process, preserve, and provide access. However, Archival Linked Data requires the development of a new set of technical skills, taking archivists beyond the traditional archival toolbox. It is essential that archivists involve themselves in the production of Archival Linked Data, tools and web services, and engage in scholarly discussion about Linked Data and the Semantic Web, to ensure that the distinguishing characteristics of “archives” are understood and retained. Not only do archivists have unique knowledge of their collections and working practices. Archival scholars and practitioners bring their own set of professional concerns and priorities to the Linked Data environment, ranging from rights management, and the documentation of provenance(s) and other necessary contextual and administrative data, to issues regarding the decolonisation of archival description and descriptive practices, and the long-term preservation of Archival Linked Data. Seth van Hooland and Ruben Verborgh see the growth of archival Linked Data as providing opportunity: “Technology has profoundly influenced the humanities, but we can also leave our marks on technology. Let us hope that the application of linked data principles in our cultural heritage institutions invites people from the humanities and the sciences to pick up the gloves, step into the intellectual boxing ring and engage in a challenging sparring round” ( 2014 , pp. 249). Concerningly, however, Dominic Oldman et al. argue that the lack of context, misrepresentation and ambiguity of historical information published as Linked Data “can be explained, in part, by the lack of engagement or involvement of domain experts themselves in the digital representation of their data, and their lack of knowledge about the possibilities of Semantic technologies, ultimately resulting in the dominance of the technologist at the so-called intersection of digital humanities” ( 2016 , pp. 256). Without the increased involvement and advocacy of archival scholars and practitioners, their professional concerns may continue to be overlooked in the drive to increase access to and datafy digital archives. Their absence is already being felt, diminishing the usability, trustworthiness, and sustainability of the Archival Linked Data datasets and web services produced, and limiting their potential for utilisation by digital humanists and other users.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Dr Margaret Procter for her comments on an earlier version of this article.

The author’s research is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and Barclays Group Archives as part of a Collaborative Doctoral Award. In collaboration with Barclays Group Archives, the author was the recipient of a grant from the UK National Archives Archive Testbed Fund in 2020.

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Hawkins, A. Archives, linked data and the digital humanities: increasing access to digitised and born-digital archives via the semantic web. Arch Sci 22 , 319–344 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-021-09381-0

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The visual side of digital humanities: a survey on topics, researchers, and epistemic cultures

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Sander Münster, Melissa Terras, The visual side of digital humanities: a survey on topics, researchers, and epistemic cultures, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities , Volume 35, Issue 2, June 2020, Pages 366–389, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqz022

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Although the digital humanities have traditionally been conceived as a text-based discipline, both digital visualization techniques as well as visual analysis are increasingly used for research in various humanities disciplines. Since there are several overlaps in epistemic cultures of visually oriented and digitally supported research in art and architectural history studies, museology, and archaeology, as well as cultural heritage, we introduce ‘visual digital humanities’ as novel ‘umbrella’ term to cover research approaches in the digital humanities that are dependent on both consuming and producing pictorial, rather than textual, information to answer their humanities research questions. This article aims to determine this particular field of research in terms of (1) research topics, (2) disciplinary standards, and (3) a scholarly culture as well as (4) researchers’ habits and backgrounds. This study is intended to highlight a scope of phenomena and aspects of relevance. Information is gathered by interviews with researchers at London universities and workshops held in Germany and Sweden.

1.1 Visual oriented approaches in the digital humanities

Despite various attempts ( Kirschenbaum, 2010 ; Alvarado, 2011 ; Gold, 2012 ; Carter, 2013 ; Terras et al. , 2013 ), the definition of digital humanities is still blurred and heterogeneous ( Alvarado, 2011 ; Gibbs, 2011 ). From a historical perspective, the digital humanities have evolved since the mid-2000s through the development of an independent epistemic culture from the historical computer science and ‘Humanities Computing’ ( Hockey, 2004 ; Davidson, 2008 ; Svensson, 2009 , 2010 ; Nyhan and Flinn, 2016 ). There is also a broad consensus that digital humanities deal with ‘the application of technology to humanities work’ ( Gibbs, 2011 ). However, there is still controversy about the use of digital methods. That comprises the questions whether digital humanities are ‘worthy of an academic department’ by means of a sufficient level of academic rigor ( Terras, 2006a , p. 230), whether an object of research is limited to digitally supported research methods or dealing with all aspects of digitally supported scholarship ( Stam, 1997 ; Unsworth, 2000 ; Beaudoin, 2009 ; Beaudoin and Brady, 2011 ; Zorich, 2012 ; Kemman et al. , 2014 ; Long and Schonfeld, 2014 ; Hersey et al. , 2015 ) and finally, what are their unique research benefits. With regards to that latter aspect and from the perspective of humanities research, especially novel qualities and opportunities for pattern recognition, an easy scalability and editing of information are mentioned ( Moretti, 2007 ; Bodenhamer et al. , 2010b ; Ch'ng et al. , 2013 ; Münster, 2016c ).

The data foci of digital humanities are texts, images and objects. While the use of digital methods in the text-oriented disciplines is currently widely established and standardized ( Bundesministerium Für Bildung Und Forschung, 2014 , p. 10), a scope of digital methods related to images and other visual objects based on vision rather than close reading remains—despite various attempts ( Bentkowska-Kafel et al. , 2006 ; Arnold and Geser, 2008 ; Frischer and Dakouri-Hild, 2008 ;, Bodenhamer et al. , 2010a ; Ch'ng et al. , 2013 )—essentially uncharted. Possible reasons may be seen in the ‘diverse nature of the methods used’ in disciplines focussing on these types of artifacts like art and architectural history, cultural heritage studies or museology ( Long and Schonfeld, 2014 , p. 48), but also in the heterogeneous level of establishment of digital research methods in those disciplines ( Hicks, 2006 ). A common bond in visually oriented and digitally supported research in art and architectural history studies, 1 museology, 2 and archaeology, 3 as well as Cultural Heritage 4 may be their grounding in visual literacy. The concept of visual literacy “refers to a group of largely acquired abilities, i.e., the abilities to understand (read), and use (write) images [and spatial objects], as well as to think and learn in terms of images [and spatial objects]” ( Avgerinou, 2001 , p. 26). Within their meta-analysis, Avgerinou and Pettersson affirmed ‘art, philosophy, linguistics, psychology’ as parent disciplines for visual literacy as well as ‘visual thinking, visual learning & teaching, visual perception, and communication’ as the main constructs that underly it ( Avgerinou and Pettersson, 2011 , p. 4). Only a few publications link visual literacy and digital humanities. Jessop refers to the widely established London Charter ( Beacham et al. , 2006 ) as a ‘possible framework for the development of appropriate methods and standards’ for the creation of visual content in the humanities ( Jessop, 2008 ). Since the concept of visual literacy originates in education, there are some publications about didactical and motivational aspects concerning visual literacy and (digital) humanities. As one example, Barber investigated digital Storytelling techniques for teaching history ( Barber, 2016 ).

Visual literacy skills are not naturally given but must be learned ( Avgerinou and Pettersson, 2011 ). Additionally, visual reasoning strategies highly relate to professional backgrounds ( Goodwin, 1994 ). Since we would expect commonalities beyond the artefact between the disciplines dealing with vision in the digital humanities, we introduce ‘visual digital humanities’ as a novel ‘umbrella’ term to cover research approaches in the digital humanities dependent on both consuming and producing pictorial and spatial, rather than textual, information to answer their humanities research questions.

1.2 A definition of visual digital humanities

Visual digital humanities encompass the computational supported research on complex visual information to treat research questions and interests from the humanities. 5 According to Heusinger, computers support the work in art history, and, in a wider scope, in all visually oriented humanities disciplines, concerning aspects of:

Data collection, e.g. through digitization;

Data retrieval from database records with the transfer of knowledge;

Examining visual humanities questions, e.g. a composition of complex figurative paintings;

Reconstructing, simulating, and producing objects; and

Administering and organizing people and objects. 6

In our definition a range includes the analysis of complex visual information, their collection and semantic enrichment, as well as the creation of imagery in context of

image analysis (e.g. the pattern analysis of large-scale image collections)

perception based techniques (e.g. the visuospatial analysis of architectural objects)

spatial modelling (e.g. 3D reconstruction of historical architecture)

visualization (e.g. sketching for visuospatial reasoning). 7

Therefore, a common bond can be found in the facts that objects are cultural heritage artifacts and images, and that scholars in visual digital humanities are using technologies to ‘understand (read), and use (write) images [and spatial objects], as well as to think and learn in terms of images [and spatial objects]’ ( Horton, 1983 ) in humanities work.

We have introduced visual digital humanities from a theoretical perspective: our interest is now to investigate it empirically in order to specify its characteristics. Against this background, our research is intended to answer the following questions:

How do researchers enter the visual digital humanities?

Which are research topics and methods in the visual digital humanities?

What are standards and challenges in visual digital humanities?

Is there a specific scholarly culture in the visual digital humanities?

The outcome should be a state of the art sketch as well as implications for further organizational development, software design, and educational practice. While our approach is primarily based on qualitative empirical research methods, the intended outcome is to build hypothesis on the scope of the field of visual digital humanities, or those using and generating digital pictoral rather than textual information in the humanities.

How do you investigate the characteristics of a scholarly area? Several approaches focusing on historical, philosophical, and sociological aspects ( Becher, 1989 ; Krishnan, 2009 ), and various methods for the investigation of researchers and academic fields by empirical methods are provided by Science and Technology Studies (STS). A prominent method characterizes fields of research by specific epistemic cultures in terms of different ‘architectures of empirical approaches, specific constructions of the referent, particular ontologies of instruments, and different social machines’ ( Knorr-Cetina, 1999 , p. 3), different techniques to gain insights, different vocabularies, different publication bodies, and habits ( Cetina and Reichmann, 2015 ). According to this approach, scholarly fields are characterized to ‘(a) have a particular object of research […], (b) have a body of accumulated specialist knowledge […], (c) have theories and concepts […], (d) use specific terminologies […], (e) have developed specific research methods […], and (f) must have some institutional manifestation in the form of subjects taught at universities or colleges […]’ ( Krishnan, 2009 ). Shared narratives are also important facilitators of a disciplinary culture, which has been investigated in Digital Humanities (c.f. Nyhan and Flinn, 2016 ). On a more operational level, the community of practice approach originally introduced by Lave and Wenger (1991) defines that these communities are marked by mutual engagement, a joint enterprise as well as a shared repertoire of knowledge and culture ( Wenger, 1998 ). Against this background, three areas are of interest for our investigation:

Scholars working in visual digital humanities

Fields of research, topics and methods used by these scholars

Institutionalization & disciplinary culture of these scholars.

2.1 Scholars in visual digital humanities

Research regarding scholarly behaviour often relies on analysing the publication record. With regards to a scholarly area of visual digital humanities and its adjacent fields like digital heritage, Hicks (2006) stated that publication habits as well as research habits widely spread between single disciplines in the (digital) humanities. Similarly, Leydesdorff et al. (2011) examined the disciplinary canon in humanities and digital humanities by employing bibliometric methods. With regards to a scholarly community within the digital humanities, Terras (2006b ) reported that until 2006 especially US-, Canadian-, and UK-based researchers contributed to academic discourse. Similarly, Grandjean performed a social network analysis of Twitter to map the digital humanities community ( Grandjean, 2016 ). Specifically for digital heritage, Scollar (1997) investigated the Conference on Computer Application in Archaeologies (CAA) from 1973 until 1996, and ( Münster and Ioannides, 2015 ) reviewed the Proceedings of CAA, DH, CIPA, VAST, 3DArch, and EUROMED between 1990 and 2015. As a result of both studies, researchers in the fields of digital heritage are primarily located in Mediterranean countries and have backgrounds in various disciplines—along with information technologies and humanities, these are primarily architecture, geo- and natural sciences. Secondly, information habits of visual digital humanities scholars are the focus of various studies. Since older investigations found large differences in information behaviour between scholars in different disciplines ( Tenopir and King, 2008 ), nowadays many scholars in art history as well as in architecture intensively rely on digital information as well as perform visual search strategies ( Beaudoin and Brady, 2011 ; Münster et al. , 2018 ). While Liu (2009) described general requirements for scholars in the field of humanities, Sprüker (2011) defined a set of competencies required to cope specifically with digital 3D reconstruction and visualization.

With regards to empirical investigations on computational literacy of visual humanities scholars, previous research draws an uneven terrain: for art creating scholars, Mason states that they are more ‘library-literate than previous research on artists might have suggested’ ( Mason and Robinson, 2011 ), while Elam (2007 , p. 6) notes that art historians lack digital technological competency in terms of ‘rather limited awareness of electronic resources and haven’t fully developed the skills to utilize them to their fullest potential’.

2.2 Fields of research and topics

What are fields of research in the digital humanities? Beside the already mentioned investigation done by Terras (2006b ) on publications prior to 2006, Scott performed a similar analysis for the DH 2017 conference submissions ( Weingart, 2016 ) and Tang et al. (2017) for journal articles in that field as well as Given and Willson (2018 ) in particular for textual oriented digital humanities. A community identified by Terras’ analysis exclusively dealt with textual and—few—image sources. In contrast, digital heritage related aspects as visualization, geospatial analysis or VR/AR were present in Scott’s 2017’s TOP-50 keyword list. Similarly, Tang et al. found out topics as 3D or Visualization less frequent occurring as keywords of academic journals in the field of Digital Humanities than textmining or TEI. 8 If visual content is only occasionally mentioned by a digital humanities community as defined by ADHO, 9 where does a discourse on visual digital heritage takes place instead? It can be stated that these topics have a long history. A very early bibliography specifically on images was compiled by Nowviskie (2002 ) in 2001. Much research on these topics is carried out by cultural heritage studies as well as by applying disciplines like archaeologies, museology or art and architectural history. With regards to that latter community, Drucker (2013) sketches a historical evolution as well as a current state of application of digital methods in art history. Complementary to this, Kohle (2013 ) defined fields of supplement by digital tools and practices in art history. The scope of topics of relevance for digital museology is currently being examined by the EU funded ViMM network (2017) , which started in 2016. Similarly, many texts describe a comprehensive state of the art as well as methodologies for digital archaeology (e.g. Evans and Daly, 2006 ; Kansa et al. , 2011 ; Frischer and Dakouri-Hild, 2008 ). Furthermore, there are many standards and guidelines as well as rules defined and discussed for dealing with historical content ( Sürül et al. , 2003 ; Beacham et al. , 2006 ; Pfarr, 2009 ; Bendicho, 2011 ; Kiouss et al. , 2011 ). Despite the broad variety of approaches and topics, digital cultural heritage evolved to a specific academic field with conferences, journals, and various frequently contributing researchers and institutions ( Münster, 2017b ). Particularly for monuments and art research the scholarly community is driven by researchers from European countries and especially Italy with a background in humanities. Most prominent research areas are data acquisition and management, visualization, or analysis. Recent topics are for instance unmanned airborne vehicle (UAV)-based 3D surveying technologies, augmented and virtual reality visualization, metadata and paradata standards for documentation, and virtual museums. Moreover, conference series are most relevant for a scientific discourse, and especially EU projects set pace as most important research endeavours.

Finally, a definition of topics took place by curriculum setting initiatives. From the latter point of view, Sahle et al. (2013) defined a core curriculum which is intended to serve as a blueprint for a design of digital humanities courses in German academia—similarly, Svensson (2009 ) defined areas of interest for an international landscape in digital humanities. With regards to visual digital humanities, there is still no wide consensus on a specific education paradigm, and larger studies on the education of digital methods in visual digital humanities are still missing ( Sprünker, 2013 , p. 405). A set of topics of relevance for digital heritage in particular was defined by the ITN training network and comprised especially surveying database and visualization technologies ( Ioannides, 2014 ).

2.3 Institutionalization and disciplinary culture

While the system that is still most established to classify epistemic spheres is ‘disciplines’, 10 an important characteristic of most current research work is their cross-disciplinarity ( Krishnan, 2009 ). Against this background, various new scientific fields arose, which are constructed around certain methods or approaches and often connect to multiple disciplines. 11

Especially from the perspective of digital humanities there is much research on aspects of institutionalization and culture (cf. Hayles, 2009 ; Svensson, 2010 ; Nyhan and Flinn, 2016 ). A joint object of research in (visual) digital humanities is defined by Alvarado in reference to Panofsky as ‘[…] the records left by man’ ( Alvarado, 2011 )—products and traces of human intellectual labour. On aspects of institutionalization, a discourse is primarily driven by curriculum setting initiatives. Since there are various publications providing an overview on course programs ( Terras, 2006a ; Duwe and Meffert, 2008 ), institutions ( Stergios, 2016 ), and organizational habits ( Liu, 2009 ; Svensson, 2009 ; Svensson, 2010 ) in digital humanities, no comparable overview is yet known for visual digital humanities in particular. An important feature is the interdisciplinary nature of a collaboration in digital humanities. Especially in the German-speaking world, there is a distinction between e(nhanced) humanities, collaboration between humanities and computer science ( BMBF, 2014 ), as well as digital humanities as a ‘hybrid discipline’ ( Cologne Center for eHumanities, 2011 ), which includes approaches and methods of both disciplines. Since the quality of cooperation is still discussed in literature, it is undoubted that cross-disciplinary cooperation is a central characteristic of (visual) digital humanities. In contrast to philosophical approaches, there is little empirical research on practices and users of digital reconstruction (cf. Huvila, 2014 ). Huvila investigated user roles and practices in archaeology ( Huvila, 2006 , 2010 ) as well as certain practices within the ongoing ARKDIS project (ARKDIS). Another empirical perspective is the research on usability and requirements for software design for humanities researchers which was investigated within the VERA project ( Fisher et al. , 2009 ; Warwick, 2012 ) as well as by Given and Willson ( Given and Willson, 2015 ) for scholars in the UK and Canada.

What are conclusions for our research? Since a joint object of research in (visual) digital humanities is cultural heritage in terms of images and artefacts, there are various sub-communities related to original disciplines, specific technologies, or dedication to education, history studies or preservation of artefacts. Despite various differences, joint attributes are project orientation, cross-disciplinary cooperation and dependency on technologies and data. Since there are various studies on disciplinary cultures in the visual oriented branches of digital humanities, research often focuses on specific communities such as digital art history or archaeology. In addition to the already named objectives for our empirical investigation, we will highlight the communalities and differences beyond links to both visual methods and digital humanities.

Research started with a series of questionnaire-based surveys on research methodologies and topics, held at the International Forum for Knowledge Asset Management (IFKAD) 12 during a session on visual communication management, as well as done during the Archaeological Information in the Digital Society (ARKDIS) conference 13 which focused on topics of information in archaeology ( Münster and Niebling, 2016 ; Münster, 2016a ). Finally, another survey was carried out during a guest lecture on digital 3D reconstruction held at City University in London in October 2016 involving an audience specialized in human–computer interaction. The paper-based survey to be filled out during the workshop contained four open questions—(1) for the interviewee’s field of research, for (2) relevant ‘gold’ standards and (3) most important publications as well as for (4) suggestions for methods and approaches to be included in a knowledge repository. In total, 44 researchers participated (cf. Table 1 ) – with disciplinary backgrounds primarily in computing and archaeology as well as on different – primarily post-graduate or professorial levels - of academic career.

Questionnaire-based surveys

Since these podia dealt with particular aspects only, they were merely employed to gain a general overview on research topics and standards of relevance.

To investigate research topics and methods, researchers, and a scholarly culture in the field of visual digital humanities in more detail, we interviewed researchers at University College London, City University and the University of London between September and November 2016. Although based in England, there were many international scholars represented in this sample.

3.1 Sampling

The sample was compiled by using a ‘pragmatic’ theoretical sampling ( Strauss and Corbin, 1996 )—due to a limited number of potential contributors and by practical aspects as for instance their availability. A first cohort was constructed to gain a wide overview on the topic (cf. Table 2 ). Guiding principles were to represent a wide scope in original disciplines, fields of application, and positions.

Interviews included in this study

To closely investigate research interests and the influence of disciplinary backgrounds in particular, which had been identified as important factor beforehand, we interviewed a second cohort especially focused on people closely linked to research—e.g. by managing or performing research projects linked to visual methods.

A third cohort of interviews was dedicated to closer investigate several ad hoc hypothesis—e.g. the relation between visual digital humanities and other disciplines. According to the theoretical sampling principles, such multi-cohort design allows to investigate potential factors and micro-hypothesis in more detail than by employing a single cohort design (cf. Strauss and Corbin, 1996 ). In total, 15 interviews were carried out—7 in the first, 4 in the second and another 4 in the third cohort.

3.2 Data collection

For an investigation of complex and non-trivial processes, mainly guideline-based expert interviews are suitable ( Mieg and Näf, 2005 ; Gläser and Laudel, 2009 ). These forms provide—compared to e.g. questionnaires—a less structured qualitative toolset, combining a set of anchor questions with the freedom to follow up points as necessary ( Thomas, 2009 , p. 164; Zina, 2010 , p. 195). Each interview lasted between 10 and 60 minutes. All interviews were recorded and semi-automatically transcribed by using the Pop Up Archive service in a non-public way (2016). All interview data were anonymized for further analysis.

3.3 Data analysis

Data analysis was undertaken using approaches of qualitative content analysis ( Mayring, 2008 ) to (1) inductively gain an initial category scheme and (2) deduce it to further materials. This resulted in both an inductively generated categorization scheme as well as a set of related variables and occurrences.

3.4 Limitations

Since this is an interpretative and explorative study (cf. Bhattacherjee, 2012 ) a general limitation is that it neither test hypothesis nor deliver quantifiable results in terms of exact measures. Moreover, potential weaknesses and limitations are caused by a potentially flaw sample—e.g. since the focus is on researchers based in London—and the qualitative and therefore maybe biased evaluation paradigm.

4.1 Visual digital humanities scholars

What are the disciplinary backgrounds of scholars in visual humanities? All queried persons started their academic education in an adjacent discipline but not in digital humanities itself. 14 With regards to their formal graduation, interviewed scholars primarily have humanities or technical backgrounds—in two cases both ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016b ; PhD student in Geosciences, 2016 ). Related humanities disciplines are archaeology, architectural history, medieval history, classics, information, and literature studies ( PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 ; PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , lines 5–7; Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 17, Digital Humanities Coordinator; 2016, line 51). As background in engineering, primarily computing was named ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 25; PostDoc in information technologies, 2016 , Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 15), further geosciences ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 23) as well as architecture and cultural heritage conservation ( Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 ). Another researcher holds degrees in both archaeology and cultural heritage management ( PostDoc in Digital Humanities, 2016 ). A resultant hypothesis would be that visual digital humanities researchers have a wide scope of academic backgrounds primarily in technical disciplines or the humanities, but often have a history of interdisciplinarity.

Reasons given for entering the field of visual digital humanities varied. The majority of interviewees mentioned that their motivation to enter the field of digital humanities was widely driven by personal research interests requiring complementary skills. Where these interests were coming from:

… another application area: With regards to a relation between academic origin and interest, in most cases research interests are grounded in researcher’s original discipline, e.g. a computing engineer ‘got into the habit of applying my computer graphics toolbox’ to cultural heritage objects ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , lines 36–37). Vice versa another researcher argued to ‘bringing the humanities skills to bear on the question of digital technology’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 , line 48).

Curiosity: In contrast, a cultural heritage management scholar did her PhD in digital humanities while wanting to know about a certain topic from a meta-perspective, in particular to ‘better understand and find the patterns and themes in the behaviour of scholars’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a , line 11).

Professional needs: Another motivation was driven by professional needs, in case of a researcher who works in an urban planning interest group ‘[the use of GIS] was the only way that I saw that multiple audiences could actually extract information’ ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 15).

In contrast, four researchers who entered the field of digital humanities as computing engineers figured out that their entrance in digital humanities took place via employment in a project ( Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 15; PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 , line 18; PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016b , line 31; Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 19). That leads to the hypothesis that especially for humanities researchers, the motivation to enter the field of visual digital humanities is widely driven by research interests, and using appropriate methods to answer research questions. This corresponds with studies about students’ epistemological belief. According to Paulsens and Wells investigation from 1998 students from humanities are more deeply reflecting about knowledge (… and research practices) as well as being willing to learning about non-familiar topics than in applied disciplines as engineering ( Paulsen and Wells, 1998 ; Paulsen and Feldman, 2005 ).

Similarly, How do individuals learn visual digital humanities methods?

As a closely linked question, how do scholars in the field of visual digital humanities acquire knowledge in complementary areas?

Studying courses in the complementary discipline: In one single case the researcher ‘did the masters [course] of the advanced visualization and analysis […] which is the hardest thing I've ever done. Lot of maths. I don't come from a math background […]. I just sit and look at equations and think this is so exciting […]’ ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 23–25).

Self-driven learning by learning using materials: Primarily humanities researchers who went into coding mentioned that a use of learning materials was their primary resource. This comprises for example online tutorials, 15 web resources and books. 16

Learning by experience: Remarkably, it was mainly engineers who said that they did not specifically study humanities topics, but got familiar with this content by cooperating with humanities scholars. Nevertheless, they would estimate their level of expertise in humanities as merely basic. 17

It is interesting that primarily scholars with an original background in the humanities claim to acquire digital skills by doing courses or tutorials. Also from a coordination perspective, current attempts focus on a training of humanities scholars to ‘improve the digital skills’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , line 7). A general enhancement of digital competencies in humanities is underlined by another estimation of a researcher on information practices in art history: ‘[Younger] art historians being more reluctant to employ new technologies’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a , line 15). An adjacent question would be whether, vice versa, ‘technologists would have to learn humanities skills? With regards to a formal teaching program in digital humanities, […] very, very few [students] […] have a technical background’ ( Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 113). Similarly, all interviewees originating from a technical discipline stated that their experience came from practising in digital humanities, 18 even if they estimate their level of expertise in humanities issues as limited. 19

Important prerequisites for digital visual humanities are not to have a specific disciplinary background ( Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 111–113), but to have good maths and coding skills—which was named by three of the interviewees ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 149; PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 23; Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 73). A critical comment was made about the depth of acquired skills: ‘We have lots of projects where we have people that say databases or thinking about text mining but not knowing how to do it’ ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 17–19). Resultant hypotheses are that important skills for employing visual digital humanities methods are maths and coding. Primarily humanists entering the field of visual digital humanities have to acquire additional skills in maths and coding areas.

Since currently many university level programs in digital humanities are offered, esp. at masters level (cf. Duwe and Meffert, 2008 ; Sahle, 2013 ), it was interesting to note that none of the interviewees claimed to have graduated in these programs. An explanation offered by one of the interviewees is that specific digital (visual) humanities study programs have only been offered within the last 10 years ( Professor in Information Studies, 2016 , line 17), and graduates will rarely be found as active members of a scholarly community yet, due to ‘the very long pipeline’ from studying to academic establishment. 20 With regards to a comparable situation in computer graphics, another interviewee figured out that ‘people of my generation […] had their supervisors who themselves were electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, architects, mathematicians, physicists’ and brought their scholars primarily in these communities ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 77–79).

4.2 Fields of research, topics, and methods

4.2.1 fields of research.

Another interest of this article was to identify research topics in the field of visual digital humanities. With regards to surveys undertaken during the ARKDIS conference as a conference in particular on information in the archaeology (cf. Table 3 ), less surprisingly a majority of researchers work on topics of data management and acquisition—including aspects like data retrieval, data processing, data indexing, and data storage. Other areas of importance are data visualization as well as communication—especially with regards to crowd involvement and participation via crowdsourcing. A use of digital humanities methods for data analysis and a—not further specified—research on methods were mentioned in four cases.

‘What are your fields of research related to archaeological information/visual humanities?’ (Questionnaire based survey carried out at ARKDIS conference, 23 contributors, 76 answers)

With regards to the findings from the interviews, some more detailed information on research methodologies was provided. Research approaches can be distinguished as:

User behaviour studies: The investigation of the information behaviour of researchers as well as the development of supporting technologies were named by four interviewees. A thematic scope comprises the investigation of image related information management by humanities scholars ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a ) as well as by professional image users as for example journalists ( Senior Lecturer in information technologies, 2016 ) and user interaction with interfaces ( Professor in Computing, 2016 ; Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 ; Senior Lecturer in information technologies, 2016 ).

Data analysis as pattern extraction from data and their investigation was in focus of four researchers, too. One research project dealt with an extraction of metadata from archaeological excavation reports by using language processing tools ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016b ). A similar approach done by another researcher was for the abstraction of dance movements from video material via structure from motion (SFM) ( PostDoc in information technologies, 2016 ). A third researcher investigated change patterns of urban housing during time from GIS data ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 ).

Data acquisition and spatial modelling in terms of digitization of analogue sources was mentioned by two researchers in context of 3D content creation primarily by photogrammetric and laser-based acquisition of physical cultural heritage sites and objects ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 27; Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 27).

Crowd participation is a topic in three research tasks. An example is the development of platforms for crowd participation.

Visualization: Two researchers mentioned 3D printing as well as computer graphic approaches, whereby there is an interest for both the development of intuitive human computer interaction metaphors and algorithms.

Interfaces: Two researchers deal with topics of user communication. Two researchers build digital applications and interfaces to access visual data from image collections ( Senior Lecturer in information technologies, 2016 ) and 3D models derived from objects in museum collections ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ). Related research interests are for user experience and interface design.

This contrasts to the findings of Eichmann et al. (2016 ) concerning keywords of the ADHO Digital Humanities conference series, whereas analysis—namely text and data mining—are ranked first, followed by ‘Literature studies’ and ‘Archives, Repositories, Sustainability And Preservation’. Therefore, it may be questioned, whether particularly analysis is a less relevant or more diverse topic in the visual-oriented digital humanities than in the textual-oriented field.

4.2.2 Hot topics

In addition to the question of ‘personal’ topics, another interest was to examine current ‘hot’ topics in the field of visual digital humanities. Corresponding to previous investigations on the particular field of digital 3D modelling ( Münster, 2017a ), a scientific discourse is widely driven by technological trends.

4.2.2.1 Big data

Consequently, one of the current hot topics—mentioned by three interviewees—also in visual digital humanities is Big data in terms of ‘large volume[s]’ as terabytes and beyond ‘of objects to process’ ( Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 47). Since big data-based research adds opportunities such as the processing of large cohorts of information without reduction, it also adds ‘some massive challenges’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 97) in terms of efficient algorithms, and high ‘[…] computer power, bandwidth [and] storage’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 99) requirements have to be mentioned here.

4.2.2.2 Virtual and augmented reality

As mentioned by two researchers, virtual and augmented reality visualizations are popular in visual digital humanities, too, and are primarily used to present 3D scaled cultural heritage content ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 159).

4.2.2.3 Pattern recognition

The recognition of patterns especially not only by machine-learning approaches, but also with regards to appropriate interfaces to support human vision of large scale information, is another ‘hot topic’ and was named by two of the interviewees. Even if the potentials of machine learning for humanities research are undoubted, for instance to automatically classify manuscripts ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , lines 49–51), they ‘might not be an easy sell because […] trying to replicate [researchers work by computers may be seen] […] pretentious if not even heresy [by humanities scholars]’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 10).

4.2.2.4 User engagement

Various approaches to user engagement were named as ongoing topics by four interviewees in total. A list of mentioned topics also reflects current hot topics and comprises digital storytelling ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , lines 10–11), especially for museum education, as well as citizen science and crowdsourcing to classify, enrich, or assess large-scale amounts of digital content. Moreover, aspects of ‘openness’ and sharing of content are in focus—for instance, for 3D digitized artefacts ( Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 47).

4.2.3 Research methods

Since research methods in digital humanities obviously incorporate both technical and humanities perspectives, our interest was to investigate which methods are applied by individual scholars. Generally, visual digital humanities are marked by a big ‘diversity of topics and methods [as well as] […] different practices and […] different approaches’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a , line 31). On a general level, three different sets of methods could be identified:

The ‘humanities’ method set primarily focuses on the investigation of research questions by interpretation (cf. Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , lines 33–35). In digital humanities project, this mainly comprises the skills to frame relevant research questions and to ‘evaluate a variety of different sources’ ( Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 49).

The ‘engineering’ method set comprises various approaches to ‘synthesize new things […] and then [to] analyse them’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 65). Research ‘method’ is primarily to conceptualize, build and evaluate prototypes ( Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 27).

The social sciences method set: Numerous scholars employed methods deriving from empirical social sciences for their research. That comprises quantitative and qualitative approaches like interviews ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 ; PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a ) and surveys ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ) as well as observation e.g. of user behaviour ( Senior Lecturer in information technologies, 2016 ; Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 ).

How are these set of methods employed in digital humanities research projects? With regards to our interviews, we identified three prototypic modes to combine these method sets:

Cross-disciplinary research teams: In most digital humanities projects, different method sets are employed by different research team members—for instance, humanists, who determine a research interest, select sources and interpret results, while engineers develop and test a software application. Against that background, research methods are primarily adopted from the disciplines the scholars originally graduated in. Moreover, these researchers primarily participate in scientific communities in their original disciplines or involve perspectives from their original disciplines into cross-disciplinary publications.

Digitally enhanced research : As stated in the previous paragraph, it is mainly researchers from the humanities who acquire computing skills to foster their research interest in the humanities. Even if they partly achieve excellent practical skills, 21 their fields of research excellence are still related to their original scientific disciplines.

Mixed-methods researchers: A relatively small number of scholars—three in our sample—base their research on methods from various disciplinary spheres and received scientific merits in multiple disciplines. In our sample, these approaches are practised exclusively by people with degrees in two disciplinary spheres—e.g. humanities and engineering ( Professor in Digital Humanities, 2016 ; PhD student in geosciences, 2016 ) or humanities and social sciences ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a ).

This finding may contrast to the finding of Given and Willson for textual-oriented digital humanities, where tool development became an essential skill for researchers ( Given and Willson, 2018 ).

4.3 Visual digital humanities and their culture

4.3.1 a practice-grounded definition.

With regards to definitions retrieved from the interviewees, digital humanities as the umbrella of visual digital humanities are characterized by the use of computational processes to investigate the culture of the past ( Professor in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 125) from a humanities’ point of view ( Professor in Information Studies, 2016 , line 41). It is characterized by ‘interdisciplinary team[work] […] but also moves towards openness and sharing’ ( Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, 2016 , lines 89–91). Moreover, digital humanities are ‘around the subject’ ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 22) in terms of comprising a wide scope of methods and approaches as well as being practice oriented.

4.3.1.1 A state of establishment

Digital humanities are still widely seen as ‘emerging’ as they ‘have to […] establish [their own] research philosophy, […] research methodology and […] learn from […] other disciplines’ ( Professor in Information Studies, 2016 , line 19). Against that background, interviewees distinguish between a state of maturity in terms of involved researchers and in terms of organizational development. With regards to that first aspect, one of the interviewees argued that the zenith of digital humanities is over now and ‘a certain point […]when there's enough teaching programs, […] enough people involved in the society […]’ ( Professor in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 149) has been reached. From an organizational perspective, several researchers argued that it takes ‘a very long time, [sometimes] […] two generations of scholar[s]’ ( Professor in Information Studies, 2016 , line 19) to establish a novel academic discipline. A prediction of the future role of digital humanities widely varies. While ‘some interviewees would see digital humanities as an academic discipline in future, others expect a massive impact on humanities, which changes […] the nature of humanities’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 , lines 73–74). This discussion reflects findings in other research, whereas the question for current state of establishment differs ( Nyhan and Flinn, 2016 )

4.3.1.2 Small communities

Even if most interviewees agreed in being part of a digital humanities community they are often not active members there, but in smaller sub-communities on specific topics like urban history geomatics ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 ) or web archivism ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 ). These sub-communities are characterized by ‘[…] not a lot people in it’ ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 27). Since it is ‘[…] very hard to find people who are actually interested in [for instance] the big picture of a city […]’ ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 21), it sets the necessity for intensive cross-national exchange. A resultant hypothesis is that visual digital humanities subsume various smaller scientific communities.

4.3.2 Cooperation cultures

4.3.2.1 cross-national cooperation cultures.

Maybe for these reasons of specialist small communities, Digital Humanists estimate themselves as internationally well linked. With regards to academic excellence, visual digital humanities are led by researchers in the USA where that field has ‘really far more [importance] than it has in the UK’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 , lines 73–74). From the perspective of London universities, there are close ties especially not only to American institutions but also to various European countries in terms of joint projects and conferences. For instance, one museum researcher mentioned that some of their research was funded by a private US foundation ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ). With regards to the internationality of staff and students, four of the interviewees in London were not originally British but emigrated from other European countries. In contrast, a large number of students in digital humanities courses are not English originally within that population, the biggest group of around ‘twenty [to] twenty five percent is Chinese’ ( Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 199), which leads to the hypothesis that scholars in visual digital humanities are internationally well linked.

4.3.2.2 Private–public partnership

Another finding was that occasionally commercial partners got involved in research projects, too. While museum projects, in particular, get wide support by companies, 22 a private–public partnership in academic projects was described as difficult due to the expectations of the commercial partners as well as problems with institutional funders in case of mixed funding. 23

4.3.2.3 Cross-disciplinary cooperation cultures

Cooperation between different disciplines is one of the most evident attributes of visual digital humanities. Against this background, interviewees pointed out several aspects which complicate collaborations.

4.3.2.4 Problem versus question-oriented research

Visual digital humanities ‘require[s] engineers and humanities scholars to directly engage with each other […]’ ‘to produce […] more meaningful outcomes […]’. As ‘engineers we’re always looking for problems to solve’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 39) while a representative of the humanities is highly question-oriented, so ‘it's a very different perspective […]’ between these both approaches ( PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 , line 69).

4.3.2.5 Single versus team-based research

While engineering disciplines and in particular computer sciences as relatively young areas tend to perform their work in interdisciplinary and team settings, traditional humanities research was performed by solitary researchers (cf. De Solla Price, 1963 ).

4.3.2.6 Fuzzy versus static

‘I sometimes feel that brings us closer to the humanities than let’s say a purely sound scientific approach because in the humanities as well there is always room for synthesis. You’re always allowed to […] put something out there to come up with a hypothesis to and then see what happens. When we build systems we have to live with it’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , lines 85–87).

4.3.4.7 A clash of cultures

As a consequence, a cooperation quality highly depends on:

mutual respect : ‘require engineers and humanities scholars to directly engage with each other you know develop an appreciation of each other's approaches before something can come out of that’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 109). Opposite: ‘I'll criticize engineering for coming on to a problem and thinking they can solve it. Humanities is easy ( Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 51).

understanding of mutual benefits : ‘I might be able to help answer those questions but I don't know what the fundamental questions are in a particular field. And that's where the collaborative is necessary’ ( Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 41–43). ‘And as engineers we're pretty good at finding […] a good sweet spot in terms of system design [as problem solving]’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 45). As a consequence, a basic task is to highlight mutual benefits, since for instance humanities researchers ‘[…] very often […] don't know yet what they want this morning teasing out and trying to find some sort of a series of questions […] [to identify how] […] they going to use […] [digital methods]’ ( Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 30).

common ground of understanding: ‘I find that usually how people speak to each other varies by disciplines and very often I need to translate […] between disciplines’ ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 16).

These findings widely correspond to our previous investigations, e.g. in the field of Digital Heritage (cf. Münster, 2016b ). In comparison to general problems named for interdisciplinary research, both Digital Humanities Digital Heritage seem well established. Both already have specific publications bodies, so for instance the problem of a lack of appropriate publication venues, which often hinders interdisciplinary research (cf. Wessner and Kienle, 2007 ) may not apply here.

4.4 Standards and challenges

4.4.1 standards.

What are people defining as standards in the field of visual digital humanities? During a workshop held at the ARKDIS conference in 2016 people were asked to name ‘gold standards’ in terms of most relevant items (cf. Table 4 ). Even if the conference audience may represent a particular community on information studies in archaeology, some interesting findings could be retrieved.

‘What are “gold standards” in your field of research?’ (Questionnaire-based survey carried out at ARKDIS conference, 21 contributors, 56 answers)

While both publications and projects were named manually in the questionnaire as anchor examples, it was remarkable that various data repositories and services were named as ‘standards’, which underlines the high relevance of data as well as the availability of high-quality infrastructure suppliers. Moreover, ‘methods’—even if named as anchor example—were named only occasional. A resultant hypothesis is that standards in visual digital humanities are primarily defined by publication bodies, technologies, projects, and repositories. An explanation may be that Digital Heritage is—as mentioned by a head of digital museum technologies—‘around the subject’—incorporating a wide plurality of contributing institutions as well as methods and approaches.

4.4.2 Current issues in digital humanities

4.4.2.1 data accessibility.

A majority of interviewees estimate the access to data as the ‘biggest challenge’ of digital humanities (eg. PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , lines 119–23). That includes for instance aspects of data availability which is limited by legal barriers or company ownership. Since ‘much data is being shared by services like Facebook’, it is ‘[potentially] going to be locked away and inaccessible’ for researchers ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , line 73). Moreover, with regards to aspects of long term preservation and availability ‘we can’t rely on commercial companies to pay for this’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , lines 73–76). Various governmental initiatives demand to make data created by public institutions available for everyone to equal conditions. That makes it impossible for museums to contribute to research projects without making their digital assets fully available for commercial exploitation ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 20).

Beside the vast data not available online for various reasons, much data is currently not properly accessible due to insufficient tagging, indexing or linking (cf. e.g. Rimmer et al. , 2008 ; Friedrichs et al. , 2018 ). As a consequence, ‘we don’t really know what’s in there, if […] web page [links to] […] broken images’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , lines 25–27). Finally, this relates to the question how to archive and preserve complex digital data as for example ‘digital art’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , Line 115).

4.4.2.2 Legal issues of research software

Just as legal issues may hinder access to data, another challenging aspect is seen in the non-transparency and restrictions of commercial research software. This causes problems in making research outcomes fully transparent, and funding and institutional affiliation is required to be able to use research tools. 24

4.4.2.3 Increasing complexity of research

Another challenge is seen in the increasing complexity of research approaches in (visual) digital humanities. As stated by a professor in information technologies, recommendations for software programming in humanities tend to be ‘much more complex than [in] other discipline[s]’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 45). While humanities disciplines like image history or linguistics traditionally focus on specific media types, there is a current trend to investigate research issues by taking various material into account—‘visual material as well as the text[s]’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , line 27). As a consequence, occasionally novel cross-disciplinary academic units appear which are dedicated to a specific issue such ‘as the science of cities’ ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 179).

Finally, against the background of a currently primarily tool oriented academic discourse on visual digital humanities, it is seen as a big challenge there to develop ‘not just the tools but theoretical frameworks for all of them’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , line 57).

5.1 Visual digital humanities researchers

What are lessons learned from this research? Scholars in visual digital humanities derive from many subject areas: in our investigation especially engineering, humanities, and social or informational studies. Only one of the interviewees originally graduated in digital humanities. With regards to the mentioned long duration of becoming established in academia and vice versa, the currently short history of native digital humanities courses and graduations—which only became available in the early 2000s—it would be a prospective task to monitor how this situation, and the academic trajectory of those in the digital humanities field, develops in future.

5.2 A wide scope of topics, approaches, and methods

While there is a wide scope of topics addressed, data access seems to be the most crucial point. Both data acquisition and management are the most prominent research areas. Topics are widely influenced by current trends in technology and society, which may be caused by the opportunities to pitch for funding for projects by referring to up-to-date issues. Moreover, visual digital humanities topics are not merely a movement to ‘redefine traditional humanities scholarship through digital means’ ( Adams and Gunn, 2013 ). Beside the ‘technology-enabled’ use of computational technologies to answer new types of research questions and the ‘technology-facilitated’ employment of computational technologies as medium ‘for new research practices without necessarily transforming researchers’ methods’ ( Long and Schonfeld, 2014 , p. 42), a third type of research approach became apparent: ‘humanities-enabled’ research as trading in humanities techniques to answer technology related questions like user-engagement, research ethics, or to perform a comprehensive explanation of technical results. Moreover, a disciplinary identity of visual digital humanities is primarily defined by publication bodies, repositories, and projects. In contrast, there are probably neither single institutions nor methods explicitly mentioned as standard—maybe due to the ‘diverse nature of the methods used in art history’ ( Long and Schonfeld, 2014 , p. 48).

5.3 Visual digital humanities and their culture

5.3.1 visual digital humanities as cross-disciplinary work.

A key aspect of visual digital humanities is cross-disciplinary cooperation. Even if many researchers argue that digital humanities are (… or should be …) a ‘Two-Way Street’ (e.g. Flis et al. , 2016 ), it occurs in practice often as an adoption of digital skills by humanities scholars or as cross-operational projects. In contrast, a wider adoption of humanities skills by engineers rarely takes place. Are digital humanities projects for engineers just ‘another field of application’ ( Münster, 2016b , p. 357)? Even if engineers would estimate their research as topic independent ‘problem solving’, original research challenges in digital humanities are caused by the high complexity of questions ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 45) and the fuzziness of humanities research. Some principles to foster that cooperation may be seen in mutual respect, the understanding of mutual benefits and the development of a common ground of understanding—in terms of a shared terminology but also as a moderation of interests. Since experience is a most crucial factor in managing cross-disciplinarity, ‘established digital humanities research centers, and some academic libraries collaborating with such centers’ may fertilize that ( Beland, 2016 ).

5.3.2 Digital humanities as Mode 2 research

Digital humanities could be seen as a mode 2 research with an emphasis on cross-disciplinary teamwork, the use of machines and a joint intellectual property ( Professor in Computing, 2016 ). 25 Since a disciplinary culture on that type of research is widely common in engineering but less in humanities 26 that may explain why humanities scholars report the need to qualify to enter the field of digital humanities much more than engineers.

5.3.3 Are digital humanities still an emerging field of research?

With special regards to art history, Zorich stated various discipline related barriers ( Zorich, 2012 , p. 19): a conservative disciplinary culture, ‘outmoded reward and evaluation systems’ which do not reward digital work and the ‘belief that print is the only valid form of publication’. According to Long and Schonfeld, ‘at present, though, new digital methods are still seen as risky and experimental. Even where there are excellent support services for art historians who want to apply digital methods, only a minority of art historians […] are interested in using these methods’ ( Long and Schonfeld, 2014 , p. 43). While for digital humanities in general further progress is currently not undoubted, visual digital humanities would still have the potential to evolve.

What is next in visual digital humanities? As there is an established scholarly community of researchers who work on a broad scope of topics, there are numerous established conference series and journals dealing with topics of visual digital humanities, in particular with focus on digital cultural heritage ( Münster, 2017b ). Furthermore, there are specific funding programs around topics of digital heritage and digital humanities, some first obstacles for further institutionalization have already been mastered. During our investigation we examined numerous hypotheses to be tested in further studies:

Visual digital humanities scholars’ academic backgrounds are primarily in technical disciplines or humanities.

Especially for humanities researchers, the motivation to enter the field of digital humanities is widely driven by interests.

Important skills for visual digital humanities are maths and coding.

Primarily, humanists entering the field of visual digital humanities have to acquire additional skills.

The current generation of visual digital humanities scholars have seldom originally graduated in digital humanities—yet.

Scholars practice research in the fields they have originally graduated in.

Visual digital humanities subsume various smaller scientific communities.

Scholars in visual digital humanities are internationally well linked.

Standards in visual digital humanities are primarily defined by publication bodies, technologies, projects, and repositories.

With regards to recent organizational development, e.g. of eLearning (cf. Euler and Seufert, 2005 ), future important steps on the way to institutionalization of (visual) digital humanities as an academic field or discipline will be the development of specific methods, institutions, and curricula. While the text-oriented branches of digital humanities have stepped into that stage a decade ago, it is currently ongoing for visually oriented fields with some first professorships on digital heritage methods or digital art history. As the work of visual digital humanities is primarily set around tools ( Ballon and Westermann, 2006 ) and their practical application, the question for a sufficient level of ‘distinct/inherent’ methods as well as scientificity is still pending. In archaeology, an alternative way of establishment of digital methods may be visible nowadays—where digital tools are part of the methodical repertoire of the entire discipline. Due to the conservative culture of other disciplines as art history we are in doubt if an adoption there will take place in a similar way. Against that background, our approach to subsume visually oriented branches of digital humanities may be fruitful since similar topics are addressed, the same technologies are used and discussed, as well as similar challenges—cross-disciplinarity and data—being faced. However, we cannot predict if future developments of digital cultures in these visual disciplines will progress in the same direction.

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (no. 01UG1630) as well as by a travel grant provided by the TU Dresden.

We would like to thank Sun Ying for pointing out some aspects of methodology, and Christina Kamposiori, Kristina Friedrichs, and Gerit Rother for their important remarks on content and language.

Art History investigates many of the objects that Cultural Heritage deals with, mainly works of art from the late antiquity to modern age, see Dilly (1979) . While these objects themselves are tangible, Art History is also concerned with all tangible and intangible aspects connected with the work which provide insights about their origin and meaning ( Locher, 2010 ). This provokes various interdisciplinary contacts and—in the context of digital visual humanities applications – especially temporal overlaps with objects of archaeology. Methods for investigating genetic and morphologic connections are covered by analyzing style ( Seippel, 1989 ; Suckale 2001 ). Another important range of methods is concerned with the meaning of the works of art (iconography) and systems of meaning (iconology) ( Seippel, 1989 ). For a more extended glance on methodology in art history, see Pächt (1986) . Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis / ausgewählte Schriften , München, Prestel.

Museology focuses on the presentation of research findings and reconstructions with the help of visualizations in museums in combination with didactically enhanced applications ( Carrozzino and Bergamasco, 2010 ).

Archaeology investigates tangible remains and evidence of human culture ( Renfrew and Bahn, 2005 ). Archaeology. The Key Concepts , New York, Routledge in order to generate a realistic representation of what exists now, and closely approximate what may have once been ( Rua and Alvito, 2011 ). Often, the physical preservation of the objects is not intended. Therefore, a thorough documentation and data collection is even more crucial. Surveying techniques, especially laser scanning ( Christofori and Bierwagen, 2013 ; Clini et al., 2013 ; Lasaponara et al. , 2011 ) and image processing ( Brutto and Meli, 2012 ; Martin-Beaumont et al. , 2013 ), as well as photos and plans, are used to document excavations in detail and provide sufficient data for a 3D reconstruction of objects.

The term Cultural Heritage refers, as a meta-science, to a wider scientific field which addresses multiple sciences and disciplines adopting their methods. Cultural Heritage, being tangible or intangible, provides the common subject to link the different approaches. On difficulties concerning the classification and transdisciplinary of Digital Heritage as an ‘Agora’, which may also be assigned to Cultural Heritage, see Ch'ng et al. (2013) .

While the term ‘visual humanities’ is only rarely used in literature, there are currently only few other definitions available. According to Drucker, visual humanities deal with a ‘sophisticated information and interface design [that] treats the same people as subjects with advanced cognitive and interpretative abilities, where [they may respond quite differently, engaging much more deeply with the materials on offer […].’ Citation according to Sattler (2014) . The Association for Digital Humanities in Estonia defines a scope of visual digital humanities primarily against the background of ‘Representing and interpreting [non-textual] Humanities Data’. Digital Humanities in Estonia (2016) , which for instance includes aspects of data organization and computational analysis.

Based on: Heusinger (1989) . Particularly cited according to: Bentkowska-Kafel (2013) . Moreover, a scope of media and applications in digital humanities and in particular digital art history is presented in: Bentkowska-Kafel (2006) .

There are various alternative classification schemes available for visually supported research and visualization in the humanities. In context of electronic visualization in arts and culture, George Mallen defines ‘technology and culture’ concerns ‘with images, movement and interactions, in the sense of performances’ as key interests ( Bowen et al. , 2013 ). Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture , London, Springer. According to Heusinger, computers support the work in art history, and, in a wider scope, in visual humanities concerning aspects of data collection (e.g. through digitization), data retrieval from database records with the transfer of knowledge, examining visual humanities questions (e.g. a composition of complex figurative paintings), reconstructing, simulating, and producing objects; and administering and organizing people and objects ( Heusinger, 1989 ; Bentkowska-Kafel, 2013 ). An alternative classification approach for digital art history is to differentiate between addressed media and applications ( Bentkowska-Kafel et al. , 2006 ).

TEI stands for the Text Encoding Initiative, a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. See: http://www.tei-c.org

http://www.adho.org

By definition, disciplines are characterized by common methods and theories and have similar ‘reference systems, disciplinary ways of thinking, quality criteria, publication habits and bodies’ as well as a similar institutionalization ( Schophaus et al. , 2003 ). Likewise, Knorr-Cetina thought that each discipline has its own ‘Epistemic Culture’ in the sense of different ‘architectures of empirical approaches, specific constructions of the referent, particular ontologies of instruments, and different social machines’ ( Knorr-Cetina, 1999 ).

As an example, ‘Spatial Humanities’ denotes the adoption of ‘geographic concepts of space to the humanities’ ( Bodenhamer et al. , 2010b ). The Spatial Humanities. GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship , Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

IFKAD 2016 took place in Dresden, Germany, 15th to 17th June, https://tu-dresden.de/bu/architektur/cka/die-professur/news/ifkad-international-forum-on-knowledge-asset-dynamics .

ARKDIS took place in Uppsala, Sweden, June 30–July 2, 2016, http://arkdis-project.blogspot.pt/p/conference.html .

‘[…] the majority [of Digital (Visual) Humanities scholars] haven't come from that direction [originally] […] Research Administrator in Digital Humanities (2016) . Interview #8 . A less comprehensive predecessor of digital humanities studies may be seen in“[master] program[s] […] delivered jointly by the school of computing in the school of humanities’, mentioned by one of the interviewees as prominent during the 2000’s to educate technical and humanities skills ( Postdoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016b ; Interview #10 ).

‘I think people can learn very easily from things like Codecademy [as web-based tutorial platform]’ ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ; Interview #4 ).

‘I got several books of web development and I taught myself […]’ ( Postdoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 ; Interview #9 ).

‘I suppose [to have worked in the field of] language and linguistics […] the longest, but I wouldn't say I was an expert in that field’ ( Research Administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 ; Interview #8 ).

For example: ‘It was just a case of being in that space for that length of time working [in a Humanities] department, that I joined and very quickly to sort of the kinds of questions that are asked in the humanities’ ( Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 29).

‘[…] drive the new questions in the humanities […] would be my weakest part’ ( Research administrator in Digital Humanities 2016 , line 41).

‘[…] it will be a small number [of researchers originally studied Digital (Visual) Humanities] because it's a new discipline […]. And so it's a very long pipeline [from studying to becoming active part in research community]’ Professor in Information Studies ( Professor in Information Studies, 2016 ; Interview #13 ).

As an example: Two scholars with academic backgrounds in the humanities are employed in engineering positions now ( Postdoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 ; Interview #9 ; Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ; Interview #4 ).

For example, Sketchfab [a commercial company—S.M.] got involved as technology supplier in a museum project ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ; Interview #4 ).

‘But there are a lot […] of forms [to] fill in […] in any [proposal]. […] I've no idea […] how that really […] operates particularly with the commercial sector. Moreover: In cooperation with commercial companies “[…] I have to give you something back. I'm not going to get it for the good of the country”’ ( Phd Student in Geosciences, 2016 ; Interview #5 ).

‘[Without funding] I couldn't have the mapping [software] license’ ( PhD student in geosciences 2016 ).

The concept of mode 2 research was originally named by Gibbons et al. in 1994 (c.f. Nowotny et al. , 2003 ; Hessels and Lente, 2007 ). Some of the attributes named here were initially reported by: De Solla Price (1963) . Little Science - Big Science , New York, Columbia Univ. Press

One of the interviewees figured out that for PhD students in Humanities ‘in the end it's their own personal journey’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 ; Interview #2 ). The ‘solo’ scholarship got reflected in several studies about humanities research ( Given and Willson, 2018 ; Toms and O’brien, 2008 ).

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• Further Research
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Comprehending the Digital Humanities Topology Topics Documents Data Further Research

The LDA -based thematic analysis was run with only 20 topics.  Along with an enlarged corpus, an enlarged topic allotment would likely prove useful for a scholar interested in pursuing this exploration further.  The lack of granularity provided by 20 topics resulted in an impoverished topic network that, while useful for the practical purpose of exploring topic network analysis, really doesn’t provide much heft as far as exposing the thematic relations between the texts in the sample.  Many topics have a one-to-one relationship with texts when looking at strong connections (defined as higher than 20%) and as such, these could be indications of style rather than theme.  Any such evaluation would require a close reading of a sample of the papers as well as an examination of the distribution of the connections between paper and topic as well as word and topic.

While a topic can be considered at its root to be a cluster of colocated words, it is also a relation between the documents associated with it and the larger structures that topic is strongly connected to via shared words and documents.  As such, the definition of a topic and its influence on documents must be analyzed not only from the perspective of its particular word associations but also as a point between various documents and topological structures.  While this is more difficult with large corpora, with only 50 documents in this experiment, the definition of a topic qualitatively by its association with particular documents is more achievable.  Likewise, the definition of a topic by its topological location is also possible and made more possible with network visualization.

Connections between topic and paper are scaled linearly from light pink to dark red and connection width is similarly scaled.  For exact values, please see the original graph file.

Topic network analysis for strong connections (.2 or greater edge) for topics 18 and 19, which show the greatest coverage of topics with strong connections.

Strong connections of papers to Topics 2, 14 and 16.

Topics and papers with one-to-one or few-to-one paper-to-topic connections.

When looking at weak connections (10% or greater) there is a much more connected network, though there are still noticeable isolated structures outside of it.

The network as seen with connections with a greater than .1 strength between topic and paper.

Topic 1 An Interview with Julia Flanders, Part Three (a): Interview 6% Topic 1 DH2010 Plenary: Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon 11% Topic 1 Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation 5% Topic 1 Humanities computing as interdiscipline 44% Topic 2 A Digital Humanities Manifesto 7% Topic 2 The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 7% Topic 2 The French Digital Humanities Manifesto 10% Topic 2 The Turtlenecked Hairshirt 9% Topic 2 The Future of the Humanities 10% Topic 2 What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments? 11% Topic 2 Imagining the New Media Encounter 27% Topic 2 The Landscape of Digital Humanities 16% Topic 2 WHAT IS HUMANITIES COMPUTING AND WHAT IS NOT? 31% Topic 2 Framing digital humanities: The role of new media in humanities scholarship 6% Topic 2 An Interview with Julia Flanders, Part Three (a): Interview 5% Topic 2 Day of Digital Humanities 2009 8% Topic 2 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (2.2010) 5% Topic 2 Wikipedia: Humanities Computing (12.2005) 5% Topic 2 The Future of the Digital Humanities. 5% Topic 2 Computing: What's American Literary Study Got to Do with IT? 8% Topic 2 Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches 8% Topic 2 Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values 5% Topic 2 DH2010 Plenary: Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon 11% Topic 2 Google and the Digital Humanities 7% Topic 2 Digital Humanities Is a Spectrum; or, We're All Digital Humanists Now 17% Topic 2 Our commitment to the digital humanities 5% Topic 2 Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation 13% Topic 2 The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship 15% Topic 2 Defining Humanities Computing 7% Topic 2 The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanitie 7% Topic 2 The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction 13% Topic 2 Why technology matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century 5% Topic 2 THE QUESTION(S) OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES 8% Topic 2 Humanities computing as interdiscipline 5% Topic 2 Creating Scholarly Tools and Resources for the Digital Ecosystem 8% Topic 3 Wikipedia: Humanities Computing (12.2005) 5% Topic 3 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (12.2007) 7% Topic 3 The MLA and the Digital Humanities 9% Topic 3 The MLA, @briancroxall, and the non-rise of the Digital Humanities 36% Topic 3 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 6% Topic 3 Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process 16% Topic 3 Why technology matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century 37% Topic 3 More Hackety Hack, Less Yackety Yack: Ruby for Humanists 21% Topic 4 An Interview with Julia Flanders, Part Three (a): Interview 5% Topic 4 Day of Digital Humanities 2009 40% Topic 4 DH2010 Plenary: Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon 6% Topic 5 The French Digital Humanities Manifesto 6% Topic 5 WHAT IS HUMANITIES COMPUTING AND WHAT IS NOT? 5% Topic 5 Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities 10% Topic 5 An Interview with Julia Flanders, Part Three (a): Interview 7% Topic 5 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (2.2010) 6% Topic 5 Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values 6% Topic 5 Google and the Digital Humanities 7% Topic 5 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 7% Topic 5 The History of Humanities Computing 46% Topic 5 Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation 9% Topic 5 Defining Humanities Computing 5% Topic 5 Three Barriers to the Development of Digital Tools in and for the Humanities. 6% Topic 5 Digital Humanities: A Multiple Choice Test 5% Topic 5 Advice to DigHum Job Candidates 5% Topic 6 The State of Digital Humanities, 2010 32% Topic 6 An Interview with Julia Flanders, Part Three (a): Interview 15% Topic 6 Day of Digital Humanities 2010 49% Topic 6 Wikipedia: Humanities Computing (12.2005) 10% Topic 6 The MLA and the Digital Humanities 10% Topic 6 Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference 6% Topic 6 The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanitie 7% Topic 6 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 6% Topic 6 Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process 5% Topic 6 Why technology matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century 8% Topic 6 Humanities Computing - Chapter 1 33% Topic 6 More Hackety Hack, Less Yackety Yack: Ruby for Humanists 11% Topic 6 Advice to DigHum Job Candidates 14% Topic 7 The Turtlenecked Hairshirt 5% Topic 7 Digital Humanities Is a Spectrum; or, We're All Digital Humanists Now 42% Topic 7 Humanities computing as interdiscipline 6% Topic 8 The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction 37% Topic 8 THE QUESTION(S) OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES 7% Topic 9 The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 8% Topic 9 What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments? 5% Topic 9 Imagining the New Media Encounter 5% Topic 9 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (2.2010) 6% Topic 9 The MLA, @briancroxall, and the non-rise of the Digital Humanities 6% Topic 9 Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values 10% Topic 9 Kobe Bryant and the Digital Humanities 5% Topic 9 I'm Chris. Where am I wrong? 41% Topic 9 DH2010 Plenary: Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon 11% Topic 9 Our commitment to the digital humanities 6% Topic 9 The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship 10% Topic 9 SPECULATIVE COMPUTING: Aesthetic provocations in humanities computing 6% Topic 9 Defining Humanities Computing 5% Topic 9 Three Barriers to the Development of Digital Tools in and for the Humanities. 6% Topic 9 Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process 6% Topic 9 Advice to DigHum Job Candidates 10% Topic 10 Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference 5% Topic 10 Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values 7% Topic 10 Kobe Bryant and the Digital Humanities 76% Topic 10 Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation 5% Topic 10 SPECULATIVE COMPUTING: Aesthetic provocations in humanities computing 75% Topic 11 A Digital Humanities Manifesto 43% Topic 11 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (12.2007) 7% Topic 11 The Future of the Digital Humanities. 43% Topic 11 The MLA and the Digital Humanities 9% Topic 11 Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference 9% Topic 11 Digital Humanities Is a Spectrum; or, We're All Digital Humanists Now 5% Topic 11 Our commitment to the digital humanities 5% Topic 11 The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship 5% Topic 11 The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction 8% Topic 11 THE QUESTION(S) OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES 10% Topic 11 Humanities Computing - Chapter 1 5% Topic 12 The State of Digital Humanities, 2010 10% Topic 12 The Turtlenecked Hairshirt 8% Topic 12 The Landscape of Digital Humanities 5% Topic 12 Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities 32% Topic 12 Day of Digital Humanities 2010 11% Topic 12 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (2.2010) 8% Topic 12 Wikipedia: Humanities Computing (12.2005) 8% Topic 12 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (12.2007) 36% Topic 12 The Future of the Digital Humanities. 7% Topic 12 The MLA and the Digital Humanities 11% Topic 12 The MLA, @briancroxall, and the non-rise of the Digital Humanities 13% Topic 12 Computing: What's American Literary Study Got to Do with IT? 10% Topic 12 Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference 6% Topic 12 Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values 15% Topic 12 Our commitment to the digital humanities 5% Topic 12 Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation 10% Topic 12 Defining Humanities Computing 5% Topic 12 Three Barriers to the Development of Digital Tools in and for the Humanities. 6% Topic 12 The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanitie 8% Topic 12 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 6% Topic 12 Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process 9% Topic 12 Why technology matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century 7% Topic 12 Humanities Computing - Chapter 1 11% Topic 12 Digital Humanities: A Multiple Choice Test 5% Topic 12 More Hackety Hack, Less Yackety Yack: Ruby for Humanists 15% Topic 12 Advice to DigHum Job Candidates 8% Topic 12 Humanities computing as interdiscipline 6% Topic 13 The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 30% Topic 13 The French Digital Humanities Manifesto 5% Topic 13 The Turtlenecked Hairshirt 11% Topic 13 Imagining the New Media Encounter 5% Topic 13 WHAT IS HUMANITIES COMPUTING AND WHAT IS NOT? 6% Topic 13 Our commitment to the digital humanities 5% Topic 13 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 5% Topic 13 The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship 11% Topic 13 The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanitie 11% Topic 13 Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process 7% Topic 13 Advice to DigHum Job Candidates 6% Topic 13 Creating Scholarly Tools and Resources for the Digital Ecosystem 37% Topic 14 The State of Digital Humanities, 2010 11% Topic 14 A Digital Humanities Manifesto 13% Topic 14 The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 9% Topic 14 The Turtlenecked Hairshirt 15% Topic 14 Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities 9% Topic 14 Day of Digital Humanities 2010 11% Topic 14 Day of Digital Humanities 2009 9% Topic 14 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (2.2010) 5% Topic 14 Wikipedia: Humanities Computing (12.2005) 5% Topic 14 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (12.2007) 11% Topic 14 The MLA and the Digital Humanities 11% Topic 14 The MLA, @briancroxall, and the non-rise of the Digital Humanities 6% Topic 14 Computing: What's American Literary Study Got to Do with IT? 10% Topic 14 Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference 6% Topic 14 Kobe Bryant and the Digital Humanities 8% Topic 14 I'm Chris. Where am I wrong? 6% Topic 14 DH2010 Plenary: Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon 15% Topic 14 Google and the Digital Humanities 9% Topic 14 Digital Humanities Is a Spectrum; or, We're All Digital Humanists Now 6% Topic 14 Our commitment to the digital humanities 8% Topic 14 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 6% Topic 14 The History of Humanities Computing 6% Topic 14 The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship 7% Topic 14 SPECULATIVE COMPUTING: Aesthetic provocations in humanities computing 8% Topic 14 Defining Humanities Computing 6% Topic 14 Three Barriers to the Development of Digital Tools in and for the Humanities. 12% Topic 14 The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanitie 13% Topic 14 The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction 17% Topic 14 Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process 11% Topic 14 Why technology matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century 6% Topic 14 THE QUESTION(S) OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES 23% Topic 14 Humanities Computing - Chapter 1 16% Topic 14 Digital Humanities: A Multiple Choice Test 6% Topic 14 More Hackety Hack, Less Yackety Yack: Ruby for Humanists 15% Topic 14 Advice to DigHum Job Candidates 9% Topic 14 Humanities computing as interdiscipline 9% Topic 14 Creating Scholarly Tools and Resources for the Digital Ecosystem 9% Topic 15 The French Digital Humanities Manifesto 42% Topic 15 The Turtlenecked Hairshirt 6% Topic 15 The Future of the Humanities 7% Topic 15 What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments? 9% Topic 15 Framing digital humanities: The role of new media in humanities scholarship 5% Topic 15 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (2.2010) 5% Topic 15 Wikipedia: Humanities Computing (12.2005) 11% Topic 15 Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches 6% Topic 15 Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values 8% Topic 15 The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship 5% Topic 15 Creating Scholarly Tools and Resources for the Digital Ecosystem 5% Topic 16 A Digital Humanities Manifesto 9% Topic 16 The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 16% Topic 16 The Future of the Humanities 14% Topic 16 What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments? 14% Topic 16 Imagining the New Media Encounter 20% Topic 16 The Landscape of Digital Humanities 37% Topic 16 WHAT IS HUMANITIES COMPUTING AND WHAT IS NOT? 18% Topic 16 Wikipedia: Humanities Computing (12.2005) 10% Topic 16 I'm Chris. Where am I wrong? 12% Topic 16 Our commitment to the digital humanities 46% Topic 16 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 51% Topic 16 Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation 13% Topic 16 The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship 10% Topic 16 The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanitie 5% Topic 16 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 8% Topic 16 Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process 6% Topic 16 Why technology matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century 5% Topic 16 THE QUESTION(S) OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES 23% Topic 16 More Hackety Hack, Less Yackety Yack: Ruby for Humanists 8% Topic 16 Advice to DigHum Job Candidates 5% Topic 17 WHAT IS HUMANITIES COMPUTING AND WHAT IS NOT? 6% Topic 17 Framing digital humanities: The role of new media in humanities scholarship 56% Topic 17 An Interview with Julia Flanders, Part Three (a): Interview 8% Topic 17 Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches 37% Topic 17 Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference 6% Topic 17 Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation 7% Topic 17 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 9% Topic 17 Humanities Computing - Chapter 1 8% Topic 17 Digital Humanities: A Multiple Choice Test 5% Topic 17 Humanities computing as interdiscipline 5% Topic 18 The State of Digital Humanities, 2010 17% Topic 18 The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 10% Topic 18 The French Digital Humanities Manifesto 10% Topic 18 The Turtlenecked Hairshirt 21% Topic 18 The Future of the Humanities 34% Topic 18 What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments? 26% Topic 18 Imagining the New Media Encounter 13% Topic 18 WHAT IS HUMANITIES COMPUTING AND WHAT IS NOT? 9% Topic 18 Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities 16% Topic 18 Framing digital humanities: The role of new media in humanities scholarship 12% Topic 18 An Interview with Julia Flanders, Part Three (a): Interview 25% Topic 18 Day of Digital Humanities 2010 10% Topic 18 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (2.2010) 11% Topic 18 Wikipedia: Humanities Computing (12.2005) 24% Topic 18 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (12.2007) 14% Topic 18 The Future of the Digital Humanities. 8% Topic 18 The MLA and the Digital Humanities 21% Topic 18 The MLA, @briancroxall, and the non-rise of the Digital Humanities 12% Topic 18 Computing: What's American Literary Study Got to Do with IT? 7% Topic 18 Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches 9% Topic 18 Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference 23% Topic 18 Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values 8% Topic 18 Google and the Digital Humanities 6% Topic 18 The History of Humanities Computing 12% Topic 18 Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation 22% Topic 18 The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship 8% Topic 18 Defining Humanities Computing 13% Topic 18 Three Barriers to the Development of Digital Tools in and for the Humanities. 11% Topic 18 The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanitie 23% Topic 18 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 22% Topic 18 Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process 14% Topic 18 Why technology matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century 9% Topic 18 Humanities Computing - Chapter 1 10% Topic 18 More Hackety Hack, Less Yackety Yack: Ruby for Humanists 8% Topic 18 Advice to DigHum Job Candidates 18% Topic 18 Creating Scholarly Tools and Resources for the Digital Ecosystem 13% Topic 19 Imagining the New Media Encounter 5% Topic 19 The Landscape of Digital Humanities 7% Topic 19 Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities 7% Topic 19 Framing digital humanities: The role of new media in humanities scholarship 5% Topic 19 Day of Digital Humanities 2009 8% Topic 19 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (2.2010) 20% Topic 19 Computing: What's American Literary Study Got to Do with IT? 30% Topic 19 Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches 7% Topic 19 Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference 22% Topic 19 Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values 14% Topic 19 I'm Chris. Where am I wrong? 5% Topic 19 DH2010 Plenary: Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon 17% Topic 19 Defining Humanities Computing 32% Topic 19 Three Barriers to the Development of Digital Tools in and for the Humanities. 34% Topic 19 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 12% Topic 19 Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process 5% Topic 19 Digital Humanities: A Multiple Choice Test 9% Topic 19 Advice to DigHum Job Candidates 5% Topic 20 The Turtlenecked Hairshirt 5% Topic 20 The Future of the Humanities 5% Topic 20 The Landscape of Digital Humanities 7% Topic 20 Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities 5% Topic 20 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (2.2010) 5% Topic 20 Wikipedia: Digital Humanities (12.2007) 6% Topic 20 Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference 5% Topic 20 Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values 6% Topic 20 I'm Chris. Where am I wrong? 8% Topic 20 Google and the Digital Humanities 45% Topic 20 Digital Humanities Is a Spectrum; or, We're All Digital Humanists Now 5% Topic 20 Perspectives on the Digital Humanities 5% Topic 20 The History of Humanities Computing 5% Topic 20 The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship 8% Topic 20 Defining Humanities Computing 8% Topic 20 Digital Humanities: A Multiple Choice Test 40% Topic 20 Creating Scholarly Tools and Resources for the Digital Ecosystem 5%

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About Digital Humanities

Digital humanities at duke university.

The Digital Humanities Community at Duke promotes new ways to engage in and learn about the use of technology in humanities scholarship. This site aggregates information from various programs and initiatives around campus. The Digital Humanities Initiative @ the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute ,  Trinity College of Arts and Sciences , and  Duke Libraries  all provide programming and support.

This website showcases completed and ongoing digital humanities Duke projects, spaces, and activities; promote workshops, events, and activities; and serve as a portal for exploring technology solutions for collecting, analyzing, interpreting and presenting humanities scholarship.

Our expanded idea of “digital humanities” includes digital transformations of scholarly practice and dissemination within the humanities, opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative teaching made possible by digital tools and methods, creative and experimental uses of technology for scholarly communications, and critical study of computational media and digital culture globally.

Core Principles 

• teaching/research/outreach connections through courses and projects
• analog and traditional, disciplinary approaches to scholarship facilitated by the digital
• innovative approaches to research, presentation, and discovery make possible by the digital
• information/data sciences connections
• critical media/tech studies and theories informing the work
• art-science and media collaborations in teaching, research, and the arts
• external project collaborations and partnerships: local, regional, and global

Benefits of Digital Humanities

• Integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches  - You can present and interlink digitized text, images, and time-based media with maps, timelines, data, and visualizations.
• Content management and data analysis  - You can mine, map and re-organize the resources – whatever you need to uncover trends, themes and key learnings.
• Quicker access to information through digital access  - This means more people can review, see and learn from the project. You are also able to more easily search through the data, combine different data sources, hyperlink to relevant background materials, and more.
• Enhanced teaching   - Digital Humanities helps students learn by being able to see more, experience more, and collaborate together.
• Improved collaboration  - Digital resources and environments can provide a common plaform for project development and group-sourcing of materials, and facilitate local, regional and global partnerships.
• Public impact  - The projects extend beyond the classroom and make a public impact.  Not only does this help show the value of the study of Humanities, but digital projects can also help inform and engage those outside the university setting.

Digital Humanities in the Triangle

On top of the events, courses, and initiatives at Duke, there are numerous opportunities to engage with DH communities in the Triangle.

• Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative : a multi-year NEH funded initiative, the CDHI offers opportunities for digital research and training at graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty levels.
• CHAT Festival : The Collaborations in Humanities, Arts, Technology Festival (CHAT) is a bi-annual gathering of scholars, students, and digital media arts practitioners in the region. It is alternately hosted around the Triangle.

Many of these initiatives are coordinated among the  Digital Humanities Collaborative of North Carolina , a collaboration among NC State, UNC, Duke, and the National Humanities Center. The group supports an array of shared events and resources in the region. Its core initiatives include: graduate training opportunities across institutions in the Triangle, including DH certificates and shared courses; guest speakers, seminars, and conferences in the region, from library workshops to THATCamps and the biannual CHAT Festival; and helping to connect researchers in the region as a clearinghouse for projects, contacts, and scholarly opportunities.

Digital Humanities in the World

(click on the section headers below to learn more)

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations

The  Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations  (ADHO), is a digital humanities umbrella organization formed in 2005 to coordinate the activities of several regional DH organizations, referred to as constituent organizations. ADHO's constituent organizations are the  European Association for Digital Humanities  (EADH), the  Association for Computers and the Humanities  (ACH), the  Canadian Society for Digital Humanities  (CSDH/SCHN),  centerNet , the  Australasian Association for Digital Humanities  (aaDH), the  Japanese Association for Digital Humanities  (JADH) and  Humanistica , the french-speaking association for Digital Humanities.

Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)

The  Association for Computers and Humanities   (ACH) is the primary international professional society for digital humanities. ACH was founded in 1978. The organization supports and disseminates research and cultivates a vibrant professional community through conferences, publications, and outreach activities. ACH is based in the United States, and has an international membership. ACH is a founding member of the  Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations  (ADHO), a co-originator of the  Text Encoding Initiative , and a co-sponsor of an annual conference.

centerNet  is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action to benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular. Anchored by its new publication DHCommons , centerNet enables individual DH Centers to network internationally — sharing and building on projects, tools, staff, and expertise.

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory

​HASTAC  is an interdisciplinary community of humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and technologists that are changing the way we teach and learn.  Our 13,000+ members from over 400+ affiliate organizations share news, tools, research, insights, pedagogy, methods, and projects--including  Digital Humanities  and other born-digital scholarship--and collaborate on various HASTAC initiatives. HASTAC offers a  Scholars fellowship program , an innovative student-driven community of graduate and undergraduate students. 

Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH)

Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH)  is a Special Interest Group (SIG) of the  Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations  ( ADHO). The purpose of GO::DH is to help break down  barriers that hinder communication and collaboration  among researchers and students of the Digital Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Heritage sectors in high, mid, and low income economies.

Digital Library Federation (DLF)

DLF  strives to be a robust, diverse, and ever more inclusive community of practitioners who advance research, learning, social justice, and the public good through the creative design and wise application of digital library technologies. DLF serves as a resource and catalyst for collaboration among its  institutional members , and all who are invested in the success of libraries, museums, and archives in the digital age.

Lists of more organizations

• US  Digital Humanities Centers & Labs
• European  Regional Organizations
• Worldwide  Organizations ,  Centers & Institutes , &  Special Interest Groups

News & Discussion

• Digital Humanities Now **
• Digital Humanities Questions & Answers **
• Humanist ** ​
• Digital Humanities Quarterly **
• Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
• Digital Studies / Le champ numérique **
• ​DH Commons **
• Journal of Digital Humanities **
• Companion to Digital Humanities   (2004)**
• Companion to Digital Humanities   (2016)
• Debates in Digital Humanities   (2012)**
• Debates in Digital Humanities   (2016)**
• Digital_Humanities  (2012)
• Digital Humanities in the Library   (2015)
• Digital Humanities Manifesto   (1.0 & 2.0)**
• Digital Humanities Pedagogy   (2012)
• Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities  (ongoing)**
• Understanding Digital Humanities   (2012)

**Open Access

Conferences

• CSDH / SCHN Congress
• CHAT Festival ( 2016 )
• Digital Frontiers
• Digital Humanities **
• ​Digital Humanities at MLA 2016 **
• Keystone DH ( 2016 )
• Text Encoding Initiative
• THATCamp **
• University of Chicago
• University of Kansas
• University of Nebraska
• University of Pennsylvania

Workshops & Institutes

• Digital Humanities Summer Institute  (University of Victoria)**
• Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School  (University of Oxford)**
• Digital Humanities Institute - Beirut  (American University of Beirut)
• DH Bootcamp @ UNL  (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
• Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute **
• European Summer University in Digital Humanities  (Universität Leipzig)**
• The Getty Digital Art History Workshops **
• Humanities Intensive Learning & Teaching  (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis)**
• NEH Office of Digital Humanities Summer Institutes
• National Humanities Center Summer Institutes
• Visualizing Venice Summer Workshop  (Venice International University)**
• Calendar of DH Events
• List of DH CFPs

**Travel Funding May Be Available

• AHA Guidelines for Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in History
• CAA Guidelines for Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History
• MLA Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media
• DH Bibliography (courtesy of John Taormina, AAHVS)

Funding & Opportunities

• United States DH Funding Opportunities
• DHNow Funding & Opportunities Feed
• ​DHNow Job Announcements Feed
• The Getty Digital Art History
• NEH Office of Digital Humanities

Career Development

• #alt-academy  - A series of essays on building careers beyond the tenure track
• Getting Started in the Digital Humanities  - Blog post by Lisa Spiro
• ​GradHacker  - Inside Higher Ed blog
• ProfHacker  - Chronicle of Higher Education blog
• Art History Pedagogy & Practice
• Diane Jakacki's Selected Readings in Digital Pedagogy
• Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities  on Github
• ​Digital Pedagogy Integration in the Curriculum  (DHSI 2015)
• HASTAC Discussions of Digital Pedagogy
• Hybrid Pedagogy series on Digital Pedagogy
• Duke LibGuide for Digital Humanities
• DHNow Resources Feed
• DiRT Directory  - An extensive directory of digital tools.
• GeoDiRT  - A directory of GIS & mapping tools.
• CDHI Tools List  - A list of online tools for analysis & presentation.
• Support Units
• DH at Duke Libraries (LibGuide)
• DH Bibliography (DAHVC Lab Resource)
• Duke Based Projects
• Other Projects
• Humanities Unbounded
• Bass Connections
• Information Science + Studies
• Computational Media, Arts & Cultures
• Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab
• Duke Game Lab
• Rhodes Information Initiative - Computational Humanities
• ScholarWorks at Duke Libraries
• NCCU Fellows
• ScholarWorks

To read this content please select one of the options below:

Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, exploring the digital humanities research agenda: a text mining approach.

Journal of Documentation

ISSN : 0022-0418

Article publication date: 26 November 2021

Issue publication date: 30 May 2022

This study aims to explore knowledge structure and research trends in the domain of digital humanities (DH) in the recent decade. The study identified prevailing topics and then, analyzed trends of such topics over time in the DH field.

Design/methodology/approach

Research bibliographic data in the area of DH were collected from scholarly databases. Multiple text mining techniques were used to identify prevailing research topics and trends, such as keyword co-occurrences, bigram analysis, structural topic models and bi-term topic models.

Term-level analysis revealed that cultural heritage, geographic information, semantic web, linked data and digital media were among the most popular topics in the recent decade. Structural topic models identified that linked open data, text mining, semantic web and ontology, text digitization and social network analysis received increased attention in the DH field.

Originality/value

This study applied existent text mining techniques to understand the research domain in DH. The study collected a large set of bibliographic text, representing the area of DH from multiple academic databases and explored research trends based on structural topic models.

• Trend analysis
• Digital humanities
• Text mining
• Bibliographic data
• Research topic analysis

Joo, S. , Hootman, J. and Katsurai, M. (2022), "Exploring the digital humanities research agenda: a text mining approach", Journal of Documentation , Vol. 78 No. 4, pp. 853-870. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-03-2021-0066

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Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

Office of digital humanities.

THE DEADLINE FOR THIS CYCLE HAS PASSED.

Updated guidelines will be posted in advance of the next deadline. In the meantime, please use these guidelines to get a sense of what is involved in assembling an application.

Grant Snapshot

Maximum award amount, funding opportunity for, expected output, period of performance, application available (anticipated), next deadline (anticipated), expected notification date, project start date.

If you receive a "Bad Request" message when you apply, it is possible that your assigned role in Grants.gov does not give you the correct permission. See Grants Management Policy and Guidance for Awards to Organizations | The National Endowment for the Humanities (neh.gov) for more information.

The Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (IATDH) program supports national or regional (multistate) training programs for scholars, humanities professionals, and advanced graduate students to broaden and extend their knowledge of digital humanities. Through this program, NEH seeks to increase the number of humanities scholars and practitioners using digital technology in their research and to broadly disseminate knowledge about advanced technology tools and methodologies relevant to the humanities.

This program aims to bring together humanities scholars, advanced graduate students, librarians, archivists, museum staff, computer scientists, information specialists, and others to learn about new tools, approaches, and technologies, and to foster relationships for future collaborations in the humanities. NEH encourages you to develop proposals for multidisciplinary teams that include the necessary range of intellectual, technical, and practical expertise. You may draw partners and collaborators from the private and public sectors and may include appropriate specialists from within and outside the United States. You should consider not only the practical applications of the institute topic, but also address ethical implications of its subject for humanities research, teaching, or public programming.

There is wide latitude in the form and content of institutes. They may focus on a particular computational method, such as network or spatial analysis, or target the needs of a particular humanities discipline or audience. You could offer it only once or multiple times to different audiences or cohorts. They may be as short as a few days or as long as six weeks. You may host it at a single site, multiples sites, or virtually, but the format and duration should allow for full and thorough treatment of the topic and be appropriate for the intended audience and all participants must be engaged in the same format simultaneously unless modifications are needed for accessibility accommodations.

Note about Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence This grant program is one of ten NEH programs that are part of NEH’s  Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence  initiative, which is encouraging research on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI. To learn more about the initiative,  please see our page about the AI initiative .

What’s New for 2023 and 2024  

• This Notice of Funding Opportunity will apply to the 2023 and 2024 deadlines.
• We have provided more guidance on faculty and participant compensation and project evaluation.
• Applications will be declared ineligible for review if they do not include  all required sections and components
• Applications will be declared ineligible for review if they do not comply with all requirements indicated with a “must” outlined in the NOFO,  including page limits .   

The December 1, 2022 webinar recording and slides are available below:

Slide Deck [PDF]

Live Q&A Session

Please join program staff from the Office of Digital Humanities for a live Question and Answer session on Wednesday, November 29, 2023, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Click here to register.  

Optional Draft Review

Submit draft materials to @email by December 15, 2023, 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time to receive feedback from program officers before the final deadline. You do not need to have a complete application to submit materials for review and feedback.  More information about submitting a draft may be found in the Notice of Funding Opportunity.  

Read the Notice of Funding Opportunity to ensure you understand the expectations and restrictions for projects delivered under this grant and are prepared to write the most effective application.

Application Materials

Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Notice of Funding Opportunity, 2023 and 2024 (PDF)

Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Grants.gov application package

Program Resources

Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Frequently Asked Questions, 2023 (PDF)

List of Recently Funded Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Grants

All Funded Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (from the NEH Database of Funded Projects) 

Sample Application Narratives

Alexandria Archive Institute, Inc., Networking Archaeological Data and Communities

City University of New York, Digital Humanities Research Institutes: Further Expanding Communities of Practice

George Mason University,  Digital Methods for Military History

Folger Shakespeare Library, Institute on Early Modern Digital Agendas

University of California, Los Angeles, Institute on Teaching in the Geospatial Humanities

University of Texas, Institute for High Performance Sound Technologies

Vanderbilt University, Advancing XML-Based Scholarship

When you are ready to apply, register for an account with SAM.gov and  Grants.gov ; both are required. If you already have completed the registrations, make sure they are current. 

• Register with Grants.gov
• Grants.gov Applicant Tools and Tips
• Grants.gov Applicant Registration Guidance
• Download Adobe Reader
• Tips for making PDFs

Follow the instructions outlined in the Notice of Funding Opportunity and in the Grants.gov instructions. 

You will receive a confirmation from Grants.gov when you’ve successfully submitted your application. Subsequently, you will receive up to five more notices confirming different stages in the application process. Verify that you have received all confirmations. Note that email filters may send these messages to your spam or junk folder.

Program Statistics

Examples of projects funded by this grant program.

Virtual and Augmented Reality for the Digital Humanities Institute (VARDHI)

Folger Shakespeare Library's "Early Modern Digital Agendas: Network Analysis (EMDA2017)" Institute

Institute for High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS)

Digital Humanities

• Getting Started
• Digital Scholarship Services
• Mapping and Timelines
• Storytelling
• Text Analysis
• Visualization
• Communities

Open E-Book Collections

• Directory of Open Access Books A continuously updated collection of academic peer-reviewed books from over 50 publishers.
• Google Books Search a large index of the world's books. Find millions of great books you can preview or read for free.
• Hathi Trust HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries. 17+ million digitized items.
• Internet Archive Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 376 billion archived web pages.
• Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg offers over 42,000 free ebooks from books in the public domain: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.

Open Textbook Collections & OERs

• College Open Textbooks Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, this collection of sixteen educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges.
• Manifold The intuitive, collaborative, open-source platform for scholarly publishing that allows for deep reading, annotation, and engagement. You can create books or engage with others published in this platform.

MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy.

MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services and one of the largest collections of open textbooks with thousands of free open textbooks in the collection.

• OER Commons OER Commons is a freely accessible online library that provides a web-based infrastructure for teachers and others to search and discover Open Educational Resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials.
• Open Course Library Open Course Library is a collection of expertly developed educational materials – including textbooks, syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments – in 81 high-enrollment college courses. 42 courses have been completed so far, providing faculty with a high-quality, affordable option that will cost students no more than $30 for textbooks. All materials are shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY) license unless otherwise noted.
• Open Textbook Library The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network and contains open textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality.
• TopHat Adopt and customize affordable, interactive textbooks and course materials from Top Hat, or create new educational content using their unique authoring tool. 90% of the functionality is available on the "free" plan.

Some Recommended Introductory Books

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• URL: https://guides.nyu.edu/digital-humanities

What does Digital Humanities work look like at MSU?

Digital Humanities takes many forms and operates in various places around MSU’s campus. DH@MSU supports this work by providing funding for projects and professional development, offering consultations, and creating opportunities to share with the community.  We take pride in the diversity and interdisciplinarity of the DH@MSU community and invite you to learn more about its work.

Find Places on Campus

Read locus symposium abstracts, explore dh projects, read seed funding reports, where can i get help with digital humanities work.

We are here to answer your questions about Digital Humanities and how it intersects with your work. Whether for a one-on-one discussion about a project idea, collaborative technical troubleshooting, or planning a class visit, we are excited to further your engagement and success in digital humanities. In addition to the people below, there are experts available through the Digital Scholarship Lab on campus.

Kate Topham

Digital Humanities Archivist

Book an appointment directly Email: tophamka [at] msu [.] edu

Available to discuss digital preservation, digital collections and exhibits, data cleaning, python, text analysis (including topic modelling and machine learning), data visualization, and all things metadata.

Kristen Mapes

Assistant Director of Digital Humanities

Book an appointment directly Email: kmapes [at] msu [.] edu

Available to discuss project management, teaching in/with DH, computational image analysis, working with basic network and text analysis tools, grant development, digital preservation, and introductory mapping technologies. Also available to strategize website development for individuals and projects.

How can I get training?

There are many strategies for learning and experimenting with new methods and tools in digital humanities. Below are a few tutorials and workshop materials from the DH@MSU community and beyond.

• Project Incubator Program through the MSU Digital Scholarship Lab
• Simple Strategies for Adding DH into Your Pedagogy ( Voyant and Timeline JS slides ) [2020]
• Project Management and Collaboration ( Project management slides and resources ) [2020]
• Exploring Data Visualization Options with Flourish ( Flourish slides and resources ) [2020]
• Navigating the Mapping Landscape ( Mapping slides and resources ) [2020]
• Visualizing Maps and Networks with Vistorian ( Vistorian slides and sample data ) [2019]
• Chronicling America ( Chronicling America tutorial ) [2018]
• Introduction to Data Visualization and Tableau ( Tableau workshop slides ) [2018]
• Introduction to Game Making with Twine ( Twine workshop slides ) [2018]
• Getting Started with Content Management Systems and Web Publishing ( CMS workshop slides ) [2017]
• Podcasting for Academics ( Podcasting workhsop slides ) [2017]
• Introduction to Audio Analysis ( Audio Analysis workshop slides ) [2017]
• Github and Git for Humanists ( Github workshop slides ) [2016]
• Visualizing your data on the web using D3.js ( D3 JS tutorial ) [2015]
• Text Analysis with Python ( Python reference guide ) [2015]
• Getting Started with OpenRefine ( OpenRefine Tutorial )[2015]
• Introduction to Network Analysis ( Gephi Tutorial ) [2014]
• Reading from a Distance: Introduction to Text Analysis ( Text Analysis workshop slides ) [2014]
• Twine Library Resource Guide
• ESRI StoryMaps Library Resource Guide
• Programming Historian
• Digital Humanities Research Institute curriculum (including: Intro to Text Analysis with Python and NLTK, Data Literacies, Intro to HTML and CSS, Intro to the Command Line, Intro to Python, Intro to Mapping, among others)
• DHSI at Guelph (Guelph, Ontario)
• HILT – Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching (location varies)
• DREAM – Digital Resources & Methods (Philadelphia, PA)
• DHSI – Digital Humanities Summer Institute (Victoria, British Columbia)
• SEI – Summer Educational Institute for Digital Stewardship of Visual Information (location varies)
• Digital Pedagogy Lab (Denver, CO – online in 2022)
• ESU – European Summer University in DH (Leipzig)
• Public Digital Humanities Institute (Lawrence, KS)
• ILiADS – Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (location varies)

• Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
• Research Topics

Machine Learning Applications for Digital Humanities

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About this Research Topic

Digital Humanities (DH) is a dynamic and interdisciplinary field that has redefined the creation, dissemination, and exploration of knowledge in the humanities in the digital era. DH empowers researchers with new tools in order to address new research questions while engaging with vast and diverse datasets or ...

Keywords : digital humanities, machine learning, text summarization, computer vision, natural language processing, document restoration, deep learning, personalized recommendation systems

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