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

Abstract

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