Distribution features and intellectual structures of digital humanities

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conduct a retrospective bibliometric analysis of documents about digital humanities, an emerging but interdisciplinary movement. It examines the distribution of research outputs and languages, identifies the active journals and institutions, dissects the network of categories and cited references, and interprets the hot research topics. Design/methodology/approach The source data are derived from the Web of Science (WoS) core collection. To reveal the holistic landscape of this field, VOSviewer and CiteSpace as popular visualization tools are employed to process the bibliographic data including author, category, reference, and keyword. Furthermore, the parameter design of the visualization tools follows the general procedures and methods for bibliometric analysis. Findings There is an obviously rapid growth in digital humanities research. English is still the leading academic language in this field. The most influential authors all come from or have scientific relationships with Europe and North America, and two leading countries of which are the UK and USA. Digital humanities is the result of a dynamic dialogue between humanistic exploration and digital means. This research field is closely associated with history, literary and cultural heritage, and information and library science. Research limitations/implications This analysis relies on the metadata information extracted from the WoS database; however, some valuable literatures in the field of digital humanities may not be retrieved from the database owing to the inherent challenge of topic search. This study is also restricted by the scope of publications, the limitation regarding the source of data is that WoS database may have underrepresented publications in this domain. Originality/value The output of this paper could be a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners interesting in the knowledge domain of digital humanities. Moreover, the conclusions of this retrospective analysis can be deemed as the comparable foundation for future study.

Disruption risks in supply chain management: a literature review based on bibliometric analysis

“…The data source plays an important role in conducting a bibliometric study. In this study, the literature data were collected from the WoS core collection, which includes about 18,000 high-quality journals and 1.3 billion cited references beginning in 1900 (Wang 2018). The literature retrieval strategy was based on advanced search, and the specific strategies are given below.…”

“…Therefore, Price's Law is presented, and it has been widely employed to identify core authors in a certain field (e.g. Wang 2018;Zhong 2012). In this study, Price's Law is employed to calculate the minimum number of publications published by one scholar, and the equation of the threshold number of publications is as follows:…”

Confluence between library and information science and digital humanities in Spain. Methodologies, standards and collections

“…In this phase we will refer to the results of the bibliometric studies of Tang et al, (2017) and Wang (2018) in order to assess possible correlations in terms of themes and standards seen in our study with respect to the analysis of international productivity within DH.…”

“…Sula (2013) demonstrates the growing interest in DH within LIS publications, as well as a major overlap of interests, competences and institutional structures between the two disciplines. Wang (2018), meanwhile, describes digital humanities as an interdisciplinary movement and the result of a dynamic dialogue between humanistic exploration and digital means. Authors such as Dalbello (2011), Koltay (2016), Poole (2017) o Robinson et al, (2015) reinforce this idea of common interests, suggesting that DH and LIS complement one another to a very great degree since both disciplines focus on documents and recorded information.…”

Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Digital Humanities: Evidence from Public‐Funded Projects in China

“…This collaboration is reflected in the interaction between different disciplines on the one hand, and the cooperation between institutions and agencies on the other. Existing studies have explored interdisciplinary collaboration in DH mainly from the perspective of academic literature using bibliometric methods (Su, 2020; Tang et al, 2017; Wang, 2017), while fewer studies have revealed the interdisciplinary characteristics of DH from the perspective of public‐funded projects. We believe that compared to academic literature, the analysis of DH projects at the macro level can provide a clearer picture of interdisciplinary collaborations and thus better reveal the collaborative relationships between disciplines and institutions as well as the characteristics of digital scholarship.…”