Digital Humanities Research Research Articles

Interpretation of Buddhist Scriptures from the Perspective of Sinicization of Buddhism

The interpretation of Buddhist scriptures from the perspective of Sinicization of Buddhism has undergone a long and fruitful development process. From the initial period of Buddhist transmission with grid-meaning translation, to the elaboration of Buddhist doctrines during the Wei, Jin, Northern, and Southern Dynasties, to the doctrinal taxonomy in the Sui and Tang dynasties, and then to the interpretation of mind and nature during the Song and Ming dynasties, up to the modern trend of humanistic Buddhism, the interpretation of Buddhist scriptures has always interacted with the spirit of Chinese native culture, presenting a unique landscape of integration and innovation. The Sinicized interpretation of Buddhist scriptures not only demonstrates cultural confidence but also provides wisdom and inspiration for modern society. In the future, cross-cultural dialogue with the world, interdisciplinary integration and development, digital humanities research, and innovative communication methods will become new directions and challenges for the Sinicized interpretation of Buddhist scriptures.

From greatest simplicity to full power

AbstractWhile language processing services are key assets for the science and technology of language, the possible ways under which they may be made available to the widest range of their end users are critical to support an Open Science policy for this scientific domain. Although providing such processing services under some web-based interface, at large, offers itself as an immediate and cogent response to that challenge, turning this view into an effective access to language processing services is an undertaking deserving a clear conceptual direction and a corresponding robust empirical validation. Based on an extensive overview of major undertakings towards making language processing tools available and on the design principles worked out and implemented in the PORTULAN CLARIN infrastructure, in this paper we advocate for a Research-Infrastructure-as-a-Service (RIaaS) model. This model unleashes accessibility to language processing services in as many web-based interface modalities as the current stage of technological development permits to support, in order to serve as many types of end users as possible, from IT developers to Digital Humanities researchers, and including citizen scientists, teachers, students and digital artists among many others.

Exploratory Search in Digital Humanities: A Study of Visual Keyword/Result Linking

ABSTRACTWhile searching within digital humanities collections is an important aspect of digital humanities research, the search features provided are usually more suited to lookup search than exploratory search. This limits the ability of digital humanities scholars to undertake complex search scenarios. Drawing upon recent studies on supporting exploratory search in academic digital libraries, we implemented two visual keyword/result linking approaches for searching within the Europeana collection; one that keeps the keywords linked to the search results and another that aggregates the keywords over the search result set. Using a controlled laboratory study, we assessed these approaches in comparison to the existing Europeana search mechanisms. We found that both visual keyword/result linking approaches were improvements over the baseline, with some differences between the new approaches that were dependent on the stage of the exploratory search process. This work illustrates the value of providing advanced search functionality within digital humanities collections to support exploratory search processes, and the need for further design and study of digital humanities search tools that support complex search scenarios.

Sociotechnical Factors Affecting Interoperability of Digital Humanities

ABSTRACTIn the past two decades, the digitization of humanities resources has rapidly expanded, giving rise to the field of Digital Humanities (DH). This evolution has fostered a growing need for effective interoperability—the ability to access and integrate data across diverse digital collections, tools, and platforms. Despite significant technological advancements and the development of standards aimed at facilitating interoperability, challenges persist. These challenges are not only technical but are also influenced by sociocultural factors, which include organizational and cultural elements. This paper aims to bridge the gap in the literature concerning these sociotechnical factors affecting interoperability within DH projects and collections.This paper presents the analysis of the real‐world experiences of DH researchers attempting to connect material from different sources. Each participant described a specific incident where combining software or content was particularly problematic. This data was analyzed via thematic analysis. The findings reveal a complex landscape of interoperability challenges, underpinned by a range of sociotechnical factors. These factors include, but are not limited to, discrepancies in metadata standards, differences in organizational cultures, and varying levels of technical expertise among practitioners. By highlighting these factors, the paper contributes valuable insights into the multifaceted nature of interoperability issues in DH, offering evidence‐based plans to address these challenges.

Code review in digital humanities

Abstract Software and computational methods offer tremendous possibilities for digital humanities research, both accelerating existing work and opening up entirely new questions. However, software also has the potential to introduce new kinds of errors into the research workflow. How do we know that the software developed for a digital humanities project is error free and does what we think it does? Code review is a widespread technique to improve software quality and reduce the number of flaws, where a programmer other than the author reviews and comments on the source code. However, given that many digital humanities developers work in developer teams of one, code review is often not possible. In this article, we share progress and insights from an effort to establish a community code review process for digital humanities, and provide background to help understand the need and potential impacts of this work.

Explicit or implicit digital humanities? An examination of search strategies to retrieve digital humanities publications from large-scale scholarly databases

Abstract As a growing research field, digital humanities (DH) is receiving increasing attention from quantitative science studies using standardized scholarly databases. However, one of the challenges of this new line of research is how to select the query strategy to produce a representative sample of the field. In this research, we analyzed the differences between two publication samples acquired from the Dimensions database using two sampling approaches, namely, a keyword search and a DH journal list. We argue that these two samples offer distinct perspectives on the conceptual landscape of digital humanities, namely, implicit DH and explicit DH, and contribute to building a more comprehensive representation of the DH research domain. We identified notable differences between the publication samples from these two query strategies, especially the fact that these two samples have a very small overlap of publications, and they also have different disciplinary orientations. Our findings indicate that future quantitative studies analyzing DH publications should use more inclusive methods to cover both the implicit and explicit types of DH contributions. Moreover, we also discussed how our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the disciplinary composition of DH, an interdisciplinary research field.

SikuGPT: A Generative Pre-trained Model for Intelligent Information Processing of Ancient Texts from the Perspective of Digital Humanities

The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence has brought significant opportunities for the advancement of digital humanities research. Intelligent processing of ancient texts, as an essential part of digital humanities, is also undergoing a transformation in research methodologies in the wave of AIGC. The integration of generative pre-trained models with Chinese ancient texts, a vital carrier of Chinese culture, allows for deep mining of the content of these texts and provides services that make ancient texts more understandable and accessible to the general public. In this research, we propose a method that combines the most renowned Chinese anthology, the “Siku Quanshu,” with generative pre-trained models. We developed the SikuGPT model, a generative model for ancient text processing tasks, based on GPT-type language models by continued pretraining. This model was tested on two typical tasks of ancient text processing: translation between classical and modern Chinese, and classification of ancient texts. The findings reveal that our model achieves advantages in understanding and generating scenarios of ancient texts. The capability of SikuGPT in processing traditional Chinese texts helps to promote the organization of ancient information and knowledge services, and advances the international dissemination of traditional Chinese culture.

The benefits of ‘slow’ development: towards a best practice for sustainable technical infrastructure through the Davy Notebooks Project

In this article we consider technical development and its role in digital humanities research efforts. We critique the concept that ‘novel’ development is crucial for innovation and tie this thinking to the corporatization of higher education. We suggest instead that sustainable technical development practices require a combination of need, creativity and reuse of existing technical infrastructure. First, we present our theory of ‘slow’ development based on this need-driven approach, then demonstrate how this theory can be applied to digital humanities research efforts using the Davy Notebooks Project as a case study. By tracing the history of this multi-phase, public crowdsourcing project and exposing the decision-making process behind its technical development, we demonstrate the promise and possibility of the ‘slow’ method proposed. When read in conjunction with the other essays in this special issue, we hope that this article will demonstrate how digital humanities methods and technical infrastructure can support and sustain traditional modes of scholarship, and the importance of applying the same careful approach to technical development that is applied to research methods more broadly.

Quantitative Analysis of Literary Texts: Computational Approaches in Digital Humanities Research

Quantitative Analysis of Literary Texts: Computational Approaches in Digital Humanities Research

Perspective of Digital Humanities on Person Names in Chinese Pre-Qin Classic

Knowledge annotation and mining from ancient Chinese classics have become a new trend in digital humanities research in China, and historical persons get the most attention. However, few studies have focused exclusively on person names, which is rather important for understanding Chinese traditional culture. This study focused on person names in Chinese Pre-Qin classics. We conducted a humanities computing study on Pre-Qin person name knowledge through an in-depth categorization and manual annotation of person name components. The results included the disambiguation of person names, a statistical distribution of famous persons, patterns in name components, and statistical analysis of name components. Furthermore, machine learning methods on the NER of person name knowledge were also examined, indicating the feasibility of future related research.

Uncertainty in humanities network visualization

Network visualization is one of the most widely used tools in digital humanities research. The idea of uncertain or “fuzzy” data is also a core notion in digital humanities research. Yet network visualizations in digital humanities do not always prominently represent uncertainty. In this article, we present a mathematical and logical model of uncertainty as a range of values which can be used in network visualizations. We review some of the principles for visualizing uncertainty of different kinds, visual variables that can be used for representing uncertainty, and how these variables have been used to represent different data types in visualizations drawn from a range of non-humanities fields like climate science and bioinformatics. We then provide examples of two diagrams: one in which the variables displaying degrees of uncertainty are integrated/pinto the graph and one in which glyphs are added to represent data certainty and uncertainty. Finally, we discuss how probabilistic data and what-if scenarios could be used to expand the representation of uncertainty in humanities network visualizations.

A case study of incorporating digital technologies into audio-visual-oral English teaching in the context of digital humanities

Digital humanities is an interdisciplinary field as well as a set of methods and approaches that combine computational methods with humanistic inquiry. While discussions about the digital transformation of education have become more intense due to the increasing impact of digital technologies, there is still a need to explore the practice of integrating these technologies with audio-visual-oral English teaching. This article starts from the three characteristics of digital humanities research and moves on to document a three-year-long integration of digital technologies into audio-visual-oral English teaching, with emphasis on building online education infrastructure, deepening technology integration guided by the SAMR Model, and incorporating contests into formal learning. It emphasizes that the incorporation of digital technologies not only brings about significant changes in teaching philosophy, content, methods, and evaluation but also fosters the development of a new type of teacher-student relationship as teachers’ role evolves from simply “teaching and problem-solving” to placing greater emphasis on “guiding and mentoring”.

Information and Documentation Perspective to Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Context of Digital Humanities Research

This paper presents the critical role of digital humanities methods in safeguarding, research, and revitalisation of intangible cultural heritage. The study explores digitisation methods through a documentation and data management perspective, advocating for data standards that facilitate data interoperability at structure, content, value, and encoding levels. This paper critically analyses existing data standards and conceptual reference models, considering their potential and limitations for documenting and representing intangible cultural heritage. The typology of entities and processes related to intangible cultural heritage is presented and elaborated. Mapping identified entities and processes to individual classes in the CIDOC-CRM model is discussed to support the publication of data and semantic interoperability in the Semantic Web context.

Skaitmeninių metodų taikymas praeities kelionių tyrimuose

The massive digitisation of written historical sources, optical character recognition (OCR) of texts, and their online availability in recent decades have created new opportunities and challenges for historical research. The digital humanities research model presented in this paper is based on the information organisation paradigm and the application of digital technology-based methods in studying ancient travels. The model has been developed and tested using the materials of the project “Homo Viator: Travel Space and Travellers’ Experiences in Early Modern Lithuania”. The main problem of the research is related to the fact that one of the essential sources of information about ancient travel are egodocuments (letters, diaries, memoirs, etc.) that contain journeys described alongside other important life events of a particular person. However, travel descriptions form only a small part of a text of a given egodocument and are unevenly distributed among different egodocuments. Therefore, given the size of the text of the egodocuments and their collections and the number of egodocuments published in different languages, researching them as sources in only one aspect (travel) requires a significant amount of human and time resources. A similar problematic situation exists with other sources of knowledge on ancient travel: a massive number of documents published in digital form (including OCR), their texts are voluminous, and the text fragments related to travel, country descriptions, ancient travel routes, travel and mobility infrastructure, and travellers’ experiences are relatively small and scattered throughout the source text. The research model described in the paper is divided into two steps: (i) collection of the corpus of OCR source texts; (ii) collection of empirical data using a dictionary-based computer-aided [or assisted] qualitative text analysis method implemented with the MaxQDA software. The collection of the source text corpus is carried out by applying the general principles and methods of online search of scientific publications. The corpus comprises authentic, published sources relevant to the study (letters, diaries, memoirs, etc.) and scholarly publications about them, thus forming two blocks of text - sources and literature. The literature block is used as additional material for a more precise selection and interpretation of the source texts. A key element for applying a dictionary-based computer-aided [or assisted] qualitative text analysis method is a high-quality dictionary that accurately describes the concepts (categories) relevant to the research. Considering the specificity of the sources (the languages used in the sources and their translations), a multilingual dictionary (Lithuanian-Polish-English-Russian-German) was compiled. The structure of the dictionary consists of six concepts (categories) related to ancient travel: (i) journey (general description), (ii) road and its infrastructure (bridges, fords, etc.), (iii) means of transportation, (iv) resting and accommodation places (towns, villages, taverns, post offices, etc.), (v) people encountered on the way (inn-keepers, highwaymen, guides, etc.), and (vi) food of the journey. A set of keywords and phrases describes each concept. In the last stage of the study, the research model was tested. The testing showed that the model could solve the above problems that arose during the project.

A Study on Toponymic Entity Recognition Based on Pre-Trained Models Fused with Local Features for Genglubu in the South China Sea

Toponymic entity recognition is currently a critical research hotspot in knowledge graphs. Under the guidance of the national ancient book protection policy and the promotion of the wave of digital humanities research, this paper proposes a toponymic entity recognition model (ALBERT-Conv1D-BiLSTM-CRF) based on the fusion of a pre-trained language model and local features to address the problems of toponymic ambiguity and the differences in ancient and modern grammatical structures in the field of the Genglubu. This model extracts global features with the ALBERT module, fuses global and local features with the Conv1D module, performs sequence modeling with the BiLSTM module to capture deep semantics and long-distance dependency information, and finally, completes sequence annotation with the CRF module. The experiments show that while taking into account the computational resources and cost, this improved model is significantly improved compared with the benchmark model (ALBERT-BiLSTM-CRF), and the precision, recall, and F1 are increased by 0.74%, 1.28%, and 1.01% to 98.08%, 96.67%, and 97.37%, respectively. The model achieved good results in the field of Genglubu.

Indian Research Trends in Digital Humanities: an Analysis

The goal of this study is to identify research trends in India's "Digital Humanities" field. For this study, every kind of Indian research output that has been published and is indexed in the Scopus database has been taken into account. The current quantitative analysis examines a variety of publication-related factors, including growth by year, author patterns, level of collaboration, publication source, subject, and citation, among others. The study examines 35 research projects using a variety of criteria, concluding that interest in digital humanities research is growing in India. The study's conclusions show that the trend of high-quality source journals for research is expanding.

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

Introduction. We investigated the main research topics of digital humanities in China from 2012 to 2021, as well as the journals, authors, and institutions that produced the most research in this field. Method. Based on a sample of relevant digital humanities literature from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, we applied bibliometric methods and visualisation tools for a longitudinal examination. Analysis. This study took CNKI as the data source and extracted keywords for an analysis of the research output, intellectual structures, and distribution features of authors and institutions. Results. Digital humanities research in China is strongly associated with library and information science, with eight major reoccurring topics and themes identified. The leading research contributors in China are authors and institutions that are also identified and highlighted. Conclusions. Digital humanities research in China rapidly grew between 2012 and 2021. This study depicts the overall situation and knowledge structure of the research and establishes a benchmark for further theoretical research and practical innovation of digital humanities in China.

Digital Humanities and Collaborative Writing Platforms: Transforming Literary Creation

The field of research in digital humanities hasundergone a rapid transformation in recentyears.This research looks at how collaborative writing platforms can alter how literary creativity and digital humanities are treated. The research looks into the development of digital tools that enable collaborative authoring, as well as the interaction between technology and collaborative processes. The purpose of this article is to examine conventional notions of authorship, originality, and the democratization of literary expression.

The Free University and Digital Humanities Research

The Free University and Digital Humanities Research

The digital transformation processes for supporting digital humanities researchers in text analysis

PurposeThis article aims to explore how the mapping strategies between user requirements expressed by the humanities researchers lead to a better customization of user-driven digital humanities tools and to the creation of innovative functionalities, which can directly affect the way of doing research in a digital context.Design/methodology/approachIt describes the user-driven development of a tool that helps researchers in the quantitative and qualitative analysis of large textbook collections.FindingsThis article presents an exemplary user journey map, which shows the different steps of the digital transformation process and how the humanities researchers are involved for (1) producing innovative research solutions, comprehensive and personalized reports, and (2) customizing access to content data used for the analysis of digital documents. The article is based on a case study on a German textbooks collection and content analysis functionalities.Originality/valueThe focus of this article is the reiterative research process, in which humanists (from the human centred point of view) starts from an initial research question, using quantitative and qualitative data and develops both the research question and the answers to it by with the aim to find patterns in the content and structure of educational media. Thus, from the viewpoint of digital transformation the humanist is part of the interaction between digitization and digitalization processes, where he/she uses digital data, metadata, reports and findings created and supported by the digital tools for research analysis.