What Do Digital Humanists Tell Us about Digital Humanities? The Digital Humanities Discourse in Polish Cultural Studies Projects

This volume presents an exploration of Digital Humanities (DH), a field focused on the reciprocal transformation of digital technologies and humanities scholarship. Central to DH research is the practice of modelling, which involves translating intricate knowledge systems into computational models. This book addresses a fundamental query: How can an effective language be developed to conceptualize and guide modelling in DH? Modelling, with its historical roots, carries multifaceted meanings influenced by various disciplinary contexts. Modelling Between Digital and Humanities innovatively connects DH with the historical tradition of model-based thinking in the humanities, cultural studies, and the sciences. It endeavors to reshape interpretative frameworks by contextualizing DH's modelling practices within a broader conceptual landscape. Through an exploration of digital, visual and data models, the book asserts that DH holds the potential to be a cornerstone of a novel cultural literacy paradigm. By probing the interplay between technology and thought, the book ultimately positions DH as a catalyst for transformative cultural insights.

Editorial Commentary

Lists and Social MediaLists have long been an ordering mechanism for computer-mediated social interaction. While far from being the first such mechanism, blogrolls offered an opportunity for bloggers to provide a list of their peers; the present generation of social media environments similarly provide lists of friends and followers. Where blogrolls and other earlier lists may have been user-generated, the social media lists of today are more likely to have been produced by the platforms themselves, and are of intrinsic value to the platform providers at least as much as to the users themselves; both Facebook and Twitter have highlighted the importance of their respective “social graphs” (their databases of user connections) as fundamental elements of their fledgling business models. This represents what Mejias describes as “nodocentrism,” which “renders all human interaction in terms of network dynamics (not just any network, but a digital network with a profit-driven infrastructure).”The communicative content of social media spaces is also frequently rendered in the form of lists. Famously, blogs are defined in the first place by their reverse-chronological listing of posts (Walker Rettberg), but the same is true for current social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms are inherently centred around an infinite, constantly updated and extended list of posts made by individual users and their connections.The concept of the list implies a certain degree of order, and the orderliness of content lists as provided through the latest generation of centralised social media platforms has also led to the development of more comprehensive and powerful, commercial as well as scholarly, research approaches to the study of social media. Using the example of Twitter, this article discusses the challenges of such “big data” research as it draws on the content lists provided by proprietary social media platforms.Twitter Archives for ResearchTwitter is a particularly useful source of social media data: using the Twitter API (the Application Programming Interface, which provides structured access to communication data in standardised formats) it is possible, with a little effort and sufficient technical resources, for researchers to gather very large archives of public tweets concerned with a particular topic, theme or event. Essentially, the API delivers very long lists of hundreds, thousands, or millions of tweets, and metadata about those tweets; such data can then be sliced, diced and visualised in a wide range of ways, in order to understand the dynamics of social media communication. Such research is frequently oriented around pre-existing research questions, but is typically conducted at unprecedented scale. The projects of media and communication researchers such as Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, Wood and Baughman, or Lotan, et al.—to name just a handful of recent examples—rely fundamentally on Twitter datasets which now routinely comprise millions of tweets and associated metadata, collected according to a wide range of criteria. What is common to all such cases, however, is the need to make new methodological choices in the processing and analysis of such large datasets on mediated social interaction.Our own work is broadly concerned with understanding the role of social media in the contemporary media ecology, with a focus on the formation and dynamics of interest- and issues-based publics. We have mined and analysed large archives of Twitter data to understand contemporary crisis communication (Bruns et al), the role of social media in elections (Burgess and Bruns), and the nature of contemporary audience engagement with television entertainment and news media (Harrington, Highfield, and Bruns). Using a custom installation of the open source Twitter archiving tool yourTwapperkeeper, we capture and archive all the available tweets (and their associated metadata) containing a specified keyword (like “Olympics” or “dubstep”), name (Gillard, Bieber, Obama) or hashtag (#ausvotes, #royalwedding, #qldfloods). In their simplest form, such Twitter archives are commonly stored as delimited (e.g. comma- or tab-separated) text files, with each of the following values in a separate column: text: contents of the tweet itself, in 140 characters or less to_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet recipient (for @replies) from_user: screen name of the tweet sender id: numerical ID of the tweet itself from_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet sender iso_language_code: code (e.g. en, de, fr, ...) of the sender’s default language source: client software used to tweet (e.g. Web, Tweetdeck, ...) profile_image_url: URL of the tweet sender’s profile picture geo_type: format of the sender’s geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_0: first element of the geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_1: second element of the geographical coordinates created_at: tweet timestamp in human-readable format time: tweet timestamp as a numerical Unix timestampIn order to process the data, we typically run a number of our own scripts (written in the programming language Gawk) which manipulate or filter the records in various ways, and apply a series of temporal, qualitative and categorical metrics to the data, enabling us to discern patterns of activity over time, as well as to identify topics and themes, key actors, and the relations among them; in some circumstances we may also undertake further processes of filtering and close textual analysis of the content of the tweets. Network analysis (of the relationships among actors in a discussion; or among key themes) is undertaken using the open source application Gephi. While a detailed methodological discussion is beyond the scope of this article, further details and examples of our methods and tools for data analysis and visualisation, including copies of our Gawk scripts, are available on our comprehensive project website, Mapping Online Publics.In this article, we reflect on the technical, epistemological and political challenges of such uses of large-scale Twitter archives within media and communication studies research, positioning this work in the context of the phenomenon that Lev Manovich has called “big social data.” In doing so, we recognise that our empirical work on Twitter is concerned with a complex research site that is itself shaped by a complex range of human and non-human actors, within a dynamic, indeed volatile media ecology (Fuller), and using data collection and analysis methods that are in themselves deeply embedded in this ecology. “Big Social Data”As Manovich’s term implies, the Big Data paradigm has recently arrived in media, communication and cultural studies—significantly later than it did in the hard sciences, in more traditionally computational branches of social science, and perhaps even in the first wave of digital humanities research (which largely applied computational methods to pre-existing, historical “big data” corpora)—and this shift has been provoked in large part by the dramatic quantitative growth and apparently increased cultural importance of social media—hence, “big social data.” As Manovich puts it: For the first time, we can follow [the] imaginations, opinions, ideas, and feelings of hundreds of millions of people. We can see the images and the videos they create and comment on, monitor the conversations they are engaged in, read their blog posts and tweets, navigate their maps, listen to their track lists, and follow their trajectories in physical space. (Manovich 461) This moment has arrived in media, communication and cultural studies because of the increased scale of social media participation and the textual traces that this participation leaves behind—allowing researchers, equipped with digital tools and methods, to “study social and cultural processes and dynamics in new ways” (Manovich 461). However, and crucially for our purposes in this article, many of these scholarly possibilities would remain latent if it were not for the widespread availability of Open APIs for social software (including social media) platforms. APIs are technical specifications of how one software application should access another, thereby allowing the embedding or cross-publishing of social content across Websites (so that your tweets can appear in your Facebook timeline, for example), or allowing third-party developers to build additional applications on social media platforms (like the Twitter user ranking service Klout), while also allowing platform owners to impose de facto regulation on such third-party uses via the same code. While platform providers do not necessarily have scholarship in mind, the data access affordances of APIs are also available for research purposes. As Manovich notes, until very recently almost all truly “big data” approaches to social media research had been undertaken by computer scientists (464). But as part of a broader “computational turn” in the digital humanities (Berry), and because of the increased availability to non-specialists of data access and analysis tools, media, communication and cultural studies scholars are beginning to catch up. Many of the new, large-scale research projects examining the societal uses and impacts of social media—including our own—which have been initiated by various media, communication, and cultural studies research leaders around the world have begun their work by taking stock of, and often substantially extending through new development, the range of available tools and methods for data analysis. The research infrastructure developed by such projects, therefore, now reflects their own disciplinary backgrounds at least as much as it does the fundamental principles of computer science. In turn, such new and often experimental tools and methods necessarily also provoke new epistemological and methodological challenges. The Twitter API and Twitter ArchivesThe Open

The advent of the Digital Humanities (DH) has precipitated a paradigm shift in the study of culture, moving beyond traditional qualitative analyses to incorporate computational, quantitative, and spatial methods. This transformation is most profound in its reconfiguration of our understanding of the processes of cultural production and reception. This article argues that DH methodologies do not merely offer new tools for answering old questions but fundamentally reshape the questions we can ask about how culture is made and consumed. By leveraging techniques such as distant reading, network analysis, and geospatial mapping, DH challenges monolithic conceptions of the solitary author, revealing culture as a complex, networked system of influence, collaboration, and recombination. Simultaneously, through the analysis of born-digital archives like social media, fan forums, and large-scale text corpora, DH provides unprecedented empirical insights into the dynamics of reception, capturing the agency of audiences in shaping meaning across temporal and spatial boundaries. The article synthesizes key DH scholarship and presents original data analyses, including a network graph of literary influences and a geospatial map of the reception of a canonical text. It concludes by critically reflecting on the methodological challenges and ethical considerations inherent in this digital turn, while positing that the enduring contribution of DH lies in its capacity to foster a more nuanced, evidence-based, and interconnected model of cultural phenomena. This expanded article further contends that this transformation is not merely methodological but also epistemological, forcing a re-interrogation of foundational categories like 'author', 'text', and 'reader'. By examining the interplay between computational models and critical theory, it highlights how DH fosters a reflexive, systems-oriented approach to culture. The discussion also delves deeper into the implications of algorithmic culture and the ethical imperatives of working with born-digital data, arguing that DH's ultimate value lies in its capacity to bridge the historic gap between theoretical claims about cultural systems and empirical, large-scale evidence.

New Dialogues in Spanish and Portuguese Studies:Pedagogical and Theoretical Perspectives from the Digital Humanities Susanna Allés-Torrent, Megan Jeanette Myers, and Élika Ortega The Digital Humanities (DH) has been for many years, even decades, in constant development and self-definition and has been able to gather a diverse and international community that goes beyond the traditional framework of academia. Different initiatives underscored the need to advocate for linguistic and cultural diversity and adopted inclusivity as one of its core values (Galina Russell 2014; Gil and Ortega 2016; Mahony 2018; Spence 2014).1 In this process of self-(re)presentation, one of the most particular lines of debate has probably been the relationship of DH with other disciplines. Consequently, practices, theories, and fields of studies come together to seek to redefine themselves in light of digital methods of critical analysis reshaping their academic practices and scopes, creating what Ortega (2019) has termed a "Digital Humanities ecology of knowledges." Critical Digital Humanities advocates for the need of stronger theoretical frames and deeper engagement with cultural criticism (Fiormonte 2016; Liu 2012). Black Digital Humanities explores the relationship between DH and Africana, African American, and Black Studies, and how technology can bring forward an understudied field by exposing "humanity as a racialized social construction" and by reconsidering the canon (Earhart 2012; Gallon 2016). Postcolonial Digital Humanities brings to light how legacies of colonialism of knowledge production still pervade the digital cultural record (Risam 2018). Data Feminism exposes how data science can be informed by the ideas of feminisms and justice (Klein 2020). Digital Black Atlantic investigates the ways in which digital tools can better be interconnected with African diaspora studies (Risam and Baker Josephs 2021), and so forth. In this sense, Modern Languages (ML) also finds itself in the process of establishing the terms in which it intersects with the Digital Humanities. This intersection of DH and ML does not consist of the adoption of a digital literacy as a mere instrument, but as an indispensable critical and culturally sensitive component for understanding digital culture and digital methods. We should emphasize, furthermore, that this crossroads of disciplines goes in both directions, meaning that the DH can provide ML with new digital approaches to study and analyze language, literature, and culture. And simultaneously, ML can enrich the linguistic and cultural meaning of DH. A decade ago Kirschenbaum (2010), in a key article for the field, analyzed the role of English departments and the reasons for being at the vanguard of DH: the centrality of texts, which are the most suitable data to process; the long tradition of composition unavoidably [End Page 535] associated with computers; the boom of theories around digital archives and editions since the 1980s, and practices of electronic literature; the openness of English departments to cultural studies, including digital material culture; and the interest for the digitization of books and reading supports (6). Obviously, the analysis was made from the US-perspective, but it paved the way to better contextualize the then burgeoning DH field within that precise setting. In the case of ML departments, no self-assessment has yet been done. We can find "histories" of digital methods in certain countries (e.g., Spain, in Toscano et al. 2020), geolinguistic communities (Ortega and Gutiérrez 2014), or disciplines (e.g., Medieval Studies), but not in a ML context. It seems therefore that the relationship with DH is still undefined, and this is especially true from a pedagogical perspective (Taylor and Thornton 2017). Modern language departments have traditionally focused on fostering the study of language and culture. So, as ML shares some of the developments highlighted by Kirschenbaum, units devoted to ML are institutionally kept busy with communicating and teaching the foreign component with digital tools. The urgency and popularity of language teaching has, in many cases, rendered an "instrumental" use of such tools (e.g., case of language courses), rather than fostering the critical and reflective integration of DH approaches.2 It is within this context where the challenge remains of determining how the digital is adopted and taught. Scholars are already examining the multiple ways to adopt and implement methods, skills, tools, and projects both in their teaching...

The digital humanities have acquired more and more visibility and their field of action has expanded due to the increasing digitalization and the large volume of data arising from these processes. Collaborative researches on the impact that is in line with the dimensions of open science impact the scientific production chain. It aims to identify which aspects of open science are approached in the publication regarded to digital humanities. To achieve the general objective it indicates some specific objectives: it identifies the scientific production about open science and digital humanities indexed in the databases Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) and; it describes how open science is approached in each paper from the corpus and how it is related to digital humanities. It uses the bibliographic manager Zotero to organize the bibliographic data and it uses the software Atlas.ti to the qualitative analysis and applies the data mining tool Sobek and Voyant Tools in the data. From the 13 papers analyzed, only 3 do not use projects or programs related to digital humanities to present the discussion. The data mining tools do no show the relation between digital humanities and open science. It shows the importance of data management and the necessity to have guiding documents. It also points to the relevance of metadata pattern, to work to make the data suitable to FAIR principles, to train researchers and citizens to promote collaboration among different institutions and people that have a diverse background to value open science.KeywordsDigital humanitiesOpen scienceData miningBibliometricScientific production

This study argues that, potentially, digital humanities (DH), though an emerging research and disciplinary orientation, has the capacity to refine and retool the humanities and liberal arts. Beginning with some theoretical issues in DH, still in its infancy in Africa, the study focuses on the activities at the Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Lagos (CEDHUL) as a case study. The methodology adopted included eliciting relevant data from some of the ongoing DH projects at the Centre. In the discussion section, I demonstrate the use of some digital tools such as SketchEngine, 1 MAXQDA 2 Voyant Tools 3 and AntConc 4 in some discourse-based projects. The study submits that, with the deployment of digital tools for research projects and the sustenance of capacity programmes such as the Lagos Summer School in Digital Humanities (LSSDH), the prospects of DH in Africa offer rewarding possibilities for retooling humanities disciplines in different regions on the continent. Our DH works also offer some fresh perspectives and understanding of underexplored and understudied social data in Africa.

This chapter is situated at the margins of what has become known as 'digital humanities', that is, a discipline that applies computational methods of investigation to literary texts. Its aim is to suggest a new, somewhat different take on the relationship between the humanities and digitality by putting forward the following proposition: if the digital humanities encompass the study of software, writing and code, then they need to critically investigate the role of digitality in constituting the very concepts of the 'humanities' and the human.In other words, I want to suggest that a deep understanding of the mutual coconstitution of technology and the human is needed as an essential part of any work undertaken within the digital humanities. I will draw on the concept of 'originary technicity' (Stiegler 1998, 2009; Derrida 1976, 1994; Beardsworth 1995, 1996) and on my own recent research into software as a form of writing –research that can be considered part of the (also emerging) field of Software Studies/Code Studies – to demonstrate how a deconstructive reading of software and code can shed light on the mutual co-constitution of the digital and the human. I will also investigate what consequences such a reading can have –not just for the 'humanities' and for media and cultural studies but also for the very concept of disciplinarity.KeywordsSoftware EngineeringCultural StudyConceptual SystemDigital MediumLiterary TextThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Forum:Canon versus "The Great Unread" Birgit Tautz and Patricia Anne Simpson When we embarked on editing the Goethe Yearbook, we brainstormed ideas about formats for disseminating research that would usefully complement the stellar articles that appear annually. Our interest turned to the forum, a robust format that has fostered lively debate elsewhere (e.g., Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation) and has recently been popularized by our colleagues at the German Quarterly. Naturally, we zeroed in on a topic that is still underrepresented in the Yearbook but that has begun to alter the ways in which we approach the study of Goethe and, more broadly, the eighteenth century—within our comparatively small field in North America, as well as in Germany and in adjacent disciplines invested in the period (e.g., comparative literature and comparative cultural studies, genre studies, English, Atlantic studies, and history). We are, of course, speaking of Digital Humanities (DH). In the process of identifying experts in the field, we discovered that a few years ago graduate programs in German (at Yale, the University of Chicago, and Konstanz) had devoted a short course to the topic that inspired the title of our inaugural forum. As we approached potential contributors, we posed a series of questions, intended to spark not direct answers, but to serve as an impulse for reflection: What is the canon? How do we define it and how has it been reenvisioned beyond DH? What is the relationship between "mining" thousands of texts through algorithms and scholarship "merely" based on the interpretation of select literary works? What are the consequences of digitizing primary materials? How do DH methodologies and analytical practices enhance and/or endanger the study of the canon? How does "close reading" versus "distant reading" affect the legacy of canonical authors and their impact on the construction of national literary historiography in the nineteenth century? What is at stake for the discipline of literary study—for the act of (close) reading—when we ask the question about the canon versus the "great unread"? Nine colleagues who are engaged in the theory and practice of DH scholarship responded to our call. The scope of their work is impressive, providing detailed yet suggestive overviews of DH methodologies, insights into the importance of DH and its ability to recuperate historically marginalized writers, case studies of temporary canonicity, and challenges to canonical approaches to the Goethezeit. In framing the debate, we kept in mind the larger context of German studies, while assuming an uncontested relevance of literature and textual studies, certainly among the readers of the Goethe Yearbook. And while we [End Page 187] recognized the pitfalls of posing canonical literature as "read" in opposition to a virtually boundless spectrum of texts that can be analyzed only as data, we hoped to prompt a less polarized discussion about the imagined impact of DH and "computational criticism" on our field. We wanted to create a section that allows scholars—whether they are newcomers or well-versed in DH, interested in or deeply skeptical about data—to glimpse the innovative field's rich opportunities, its first instances of obsolescence, even its evident shortfalls; our goal is to allow our readers to decide for themselves whether to read broadly, which directions to pursue further, or whether to disregard the field completely. We invite continuous engagement with the contributions, not to succumb to a trend, but to continue the dialogue. The following essays impressively show that our aim for open discussions was spot-on. The contributors not only address ways in which DH can broaden an understanding of our field, but they also identify new challenges that arise; quite a few returned to the original meaning of "the great unread" in Margaret Cohen's formulation, namely the fact that canon formation has always implied a curtailing of tradition (as opposed to the texts produced in any given period). Each contribution reveals, in unique ways, not only that possible definitions of and approaches to DH are about as manifold as its projects and practitioners, but that the field has begun what we may call its own historicization; it now encompasses digital preservation, humanistic inquiry about digital objects (text, image, space, networks...

In 2003, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published Death of a Discipline, an exhortation to create “an inclusive comparative literature,” one that “takes the languages of the Southern Hemisphere as active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study.” To many literary scholars such a development seemed welcome and even likely. Instead, ten years later, an entirely different transformation has taken place via the development of the digital humanities (DH), in which the close study of literature and the languages in which it is embedded have themselves been demoted in favor of “distant reading” and other forms of quantitative and large-scale analyses and whose language politics have regressed rather than progressed from the state Spivak described. DH advertises itself as an unexceptionable application of computational techniques to literary scholarship, yet its advent has accompanied an almost complete reorientation of literary studies as a field—a virtual death of the vision described by Spivak. The advent of DH is quite unlike the ones accompanying the introduction of computers into other disciplines, whose basic precepts have remained largely intact in the face of digitization. DH’s paradoxical use of the adjective “digital” to describe only a fraction of research methods that engage with digital technology creates a tension that must be resolved—either by the DH label being reabsorbed into literary studies or by literary research itself being fundamentally altered, a goal that DH has already in part achieved.

Introduction Chapter 1. Pedagogical Cases Explained: What is a 'Pedagogical Case' and how can it be used as a professional learning tool? Chapter 2. 'Sophie' - Five year old female - motor delay and overweight - physical activity and health - motor development - physiology - pedagogy Chapter 3. 'Kate' - Six year old female - development coordination disorder - motor development - biomechanics - pedagogy Chapter 4. 'Patrick' - Seven year old male - autism - inclusive play - bio-psychomotor development - adapted physical education - pedagogy Chapter 5. 'Deshane' - Eight year old male - Black American - motor development - cultural studies - health promotion - pedagogy Chapter 6. 'Teresa' - Eleven year old female - immigrant - English language learner - multicultural competence - sport and exercise psychology - pedagogy Chapter 7. 'Rob' - Eleven year old male - elite sport - contextual perspective/psychology - biomechanics - exercise physiology - pedagogy Chapter 8. 'Yasmin' - Eleven year old female - early maturing/sexual behaviour - child development - sport ethics/policy - legislation/law - pedagogy Chapter 9. 'Greta' - Thirteen year old female - Maori - Maori culture - talented - motor learning - development - pedagogy Chapter 10. 'Onni' - Thirteen year old male - physically inactive - physical education and health education - home-school partnerships - physiotherapy - pedagogy Chapter 11. 'Jenny' Thirteen year old female - early maturing and talented - physiology - sociology - psychology - pedagogy Chapter 12. 'Tony'Fourteen year old male, poor body image, psychology, socio-cultural studies, motor control, pedagogy Chapter 13. 'Maria'Fourteen year old female - migration background and keen football player - critical ethnicity - gender studies - psychology - pedagogy Chapter 14. 'William'Fifteen year old male - Millennial and sport-crazy' - nutrition/physical activity/health, neuroscience - digital humanities - pedagogy Chapter 15. 'Laura' - Fifteen year old female - puberty and overweight - drop in blood pressure - physiology - fitness training - psychology - pedagogy Chapter 16. 'Joshua' - Fifteen year old male - amputee and low motivation - functional anatomy - positive youth psychology - exercise physiology/classification/disability studie- pedagogy Chapter 17. 'Ilona' - Fifteen year old female - migration background and English language learner - declining sport performance - sociology - psychology - physiology - pedagogy Chapter 18. 'John' - Fifteen year old male - academic achievement - psychology - physical activity/health - nutrition - pedagogy Chapter 19. 'Marianne' - Sixteen year old female - low physical activity/poor motivation - endurance training - exercise physiology - biomechanics - psychology - pedagogy Chapter 20. 'Karen' - Sixteen year old female - physically active - elite sport - Olympic dream - skill acquisition - coach-athlete relationships - socialization - pedagogy.

This Dialogues is a curated discussion of Latinx digital humanities emphasizing digital visual culture and the digital visualization of culture by scholars and artists with diverse backgrounds and projects. Envisioned as a foundational text in the growing Latinx visual digital humanities field, this Dialogues is not striving to be comprehensive. Instead, through its discussion, participants define Latinx digital humanities and visual culture broadly, with authors and artists finding common ground through their decolonial practices and community-based methods, as well as sharing concerns about and resistance to inevitable co-option by capitalism as their respective Latinx digital humanities projects work against community erasure and toward visibility. Contributors also map antecedents and futures for Latinx digital humanities projects of visual culture.

The digital humanities (DH) represent a transformative and interdisciplinary domain that integrates computational tools and methodologies with traditional humanistic inquiry. This paper examines the evolving landscape of DH, tracing its historical emergence, conceptual foundations, technological tools, and the challenges it poses to conventional academic paradigms. It interrogates the theoretical and practical implications of digitizing cultural knowledge, examining intersections with archival studies, data visualization, and ethical considerations in digital scholarship. Through a review of case studies, this study highlights how DH enables novel forms of inquiry into literature, history, media, and culture, while also revealing tensions surrounding collaboration, representation, and disciplinary fragmentation. Ultimately, the paper argues that digital humanities is not merely a methodological innovation but a conceptual rethinking of how knowledge is produced, curated, and disseminated in the digital age. Keywords: Digital Humanities, Cultural Studies, Computational Humanities, Digital Archives, Data Visualization, Interdisciplinary Research, Digital Ethics, Technocultural Literacy.

Digital humanities, as an interdisciplinary research domain, has been significantly impacted by emerging technological innovations. In recent years, visualizations have played an increasingly prominent role in digital humanities scholarship, gradually driving the field away from its traditionally text-centric orientation. This paper examines how visual topics and themes are addressed in two leading digital humanities journals—Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and Digital Humanities Quarterly —through full-text analysis of their published articles. Using BERTopic and network analysis, we identify key visual topics in each journal and investigate how these are integrated into scholarly narratives. Our findings show that, while visual discussions are diverse and often idiosyncratic, they remain deeply embedded in digital humanities discourse. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities tends to emphasize a more methodologically oriented visual discourse, focusing on visualization as a research method or as part of broader methodological debates. In contrast, Digital Humanities Quarterly offers a more balanced integration of conceptual and methodological perspectives. Building on the notion of visualizations as inscriptions, this study demonstrates how visual elements mobilize humanities ideas and scholarship, offering a foundation for further empirical investigations into visual discourse in digital humanities.

“Digital Humanities and Its Application in the Study of Literature and Culture” examines the relationship between comparative literary and cultural studies, systems theory and model building, and recent work in digital humanities. Areas of specific application include the topology of German literature, modernist poetics in China, Japan, and the United States, and the geography of nineteenth-century fiction, as well as a range of associated computational methods. Wilkens argues that computational work represents a unique opportunity for comparatists interested in large-scale cultural analysis and that digital humanities would benefit from increased participation by comparatists.