Digital humanities research: interdisciplinary collaborations, themes and implications to library and information science

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the structure, patterns and themes of interdisciplinary collaborations in the digital humanities (DH) research through the application of social network analysis and visualization tools.Design/methodology/approachThe sample includes articles containing DH research in the Web of Science Core Collection as of December 2018. First, co-occurrence data representing collaborations among disciplinary were extracted from the subject category. Second, the descriptive statistics, network indicators and interdisciplinary communities were calculated. Third, the research topics of different interdisciplinary collaboration communities based on system keywords, author keywords, title and abstracts were detected.FindingsThe findings reveal that while the scope of disciplines involved in DH research is broad and evolving over time, most interdisciplinary collaborations are concentrated among several disciplines, including computer science, library and information science, linguistics and literature. The study further uncovers some communities based on closely collaborating disciplines and the evolving nature of such interdisciplinary collaboration communities over time. To better understand the close collaboration ties, the study traces and analyzes the research topics and themes of the interdisciplinary communities. Finally, the implications of the findings for DH research are discussed.Originality/valueThis study applied various informetric methods and tools to reveal the collaboration structure, patterns and themes among disciplinaries in DH research.

A bibliometric study of digital humanities research in China from 2012 to 2021

“…The results of this study show significant correlation, and the most common category is library and information science, which is the largest component with a frequency of 823, followed by computer science (434) and archives and museums science (225), as shown in Table 2. This pattern is in line with an earlier study with an international sample: Su et al (2021) detected fifty-seven disciplines involved in digital humanities research in the Web of Science database from 1998 to 2018 with the top three disciplines being arts and humanities, computer science, and library and information science.…”

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“…There is a slight variation in ranking of the productive countries when researchers conduct analysis according to the collaboration status. Here, USA (34), UK (22), Germany (15), Italy (13) and Canada (9) took the apex position in terms of collaboration standing respectively. This extremely prolific core was predominantly made up of European nations, with fifteen of the top twenty nations in terms of productivity.…”

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