Digital Humanities Research Research Articles

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.

Unearthing historical insights: semantic organization and application of historical newspapers from a fine-grained knowledge element perspective

PurposeThis paper aims to amplify the retrieval and utilization of historical newspapers through the application of semantic organization, all from the vantage point of a fine-grained knowledge element perspective. This endeavor seeks to unlock the latent value embedded within newspaper contents while simultaneously furnishing invaluable guidance within methodological paradigms for research in the humanities domain.Design/methodology/approachAccording to the semantic organization process and knowledge element concept, this study proposes a holistic framework, including four pivotal stages: knowledge element description, extraction, association and application. Initially, a semantic description model dedicated to knowledge elements is devised. Subsequently, harnessing the advanced deep learning techniques, the study delves into the realm of entity recognition and relationship extraction. These techniques are instrumental in identifying entities within the historical newspaper contents and capturing the interdependencies that exist among them. Finally, an online platform based on Flask is developed to enable the recognition of entities and relationships within historical newspapers.FindingsThis article utilized the Shengjing Times·Changchun Compilation as the datasets for describing, extracting, associating and applying newspapers contents. Regarding knowledge element extraction, the BERT + BS consistently outperforms Bi-LSTM, CRF++ and even BERT in terms of Recall and F1 scores, making it a favorable choice for entity recognition in this context. Particularly noteworthy is the Bi-LSTM-Pro model, which stands out with the highest scores across all metrics, notably achieving an exceptional F1 score in knowledge element relationship recognition.Originality/valueHistorical newspapers transcend their status as mere artifacts, evolving into invaluable reservoirs safeguarding the societal and historical memory. Through semantic organization from a fine-grained knowledge element perspective, it can facilitate semantic retrieval, semantic association, information visualization and knowledge discovery services for historical newspapers. In practice, it can empower researchers to unearth profound insights within the historical and cultural context, broadening the landscape of digital humanities research and practical applications.

HistText: An Application for leveraging large-scale historical textbases

This paper introduces HistText, a pioneering tool devised to facilitate large-scale data mining in historical documents, specifically targeting Chinese sources. Developed in response to the challenges posed by the massive Modern China Textual Database, HistText emerges as a solution to efficiently extract and visualize valuable insights from billions of words spread across millions of documents. With a user-friendly interface, advanced text analysis techniques, and powerful data visualization capabilities, HistText offers a robust platform for digital humanities research. This paper explores the rationale behind HistText, underscores its key features, and provides a comprehensive guide for its effective utilization, thus highlighting its potential to substantially enhance the realm of computational humanities.

Minimal research compendiums: an approach to advance statistical validity and reproducibility in digital humanities research

Minimal research compendiums: an approach to advance statistical validity and reproducibility in digital humanities research

A documentation checklist for (Linked) humanities data

Documentation, including information, instructions, and use cases, is key to reproducibility in Digital Humanities research and usability of resulting tools and resources. However, despite multiple studies that support this assertion, clear and comprehensive documentation is often lacking due to fundamental incompatibilities with existing funding models and the resulting prioritisation of project tasks. Through a user study of researchers involved in using and producing Linked Ancient World Data, supplemented by existing literature, I identified components for inclusion in documentation to facilitate use of these tools and resources, as well as the reproducibility of methods used in their production. At the same time, it became clear that producers would benefit from a solution to simplify the process of documentation creation. As a result, I assembled a documentation checklist whose scope for application reaches beyond Linked Ancient World Data to other Humanities disciplines and digital methods. This paper starts by discussing previous work, before providing an overview of my survey and interview methods. I then present my findings and discuss their implications for future research and development, including an introduction to the checklist and its implementation. To conclude, I draw together threads from the preceding sections and suggest wider structural changes to further facilitate and promote transparency and reproducibility in Digital Humanities.

MECA: an undergraduate short-term study abroad research project about Asturian language and Asturian emigration to America

Manuscripts and Editions of Correspondence from Asturians is an undergraduate Digital Humanities research project in which participants in a short term study abroad program contribute to the recovery and edition of letters sent by Asturian immigrants to America (the continent) to their families back in Asturias in the late XIX and early XX centuries. Participants, who are bilingual speakers of Spanish and English, share with the authors of the letters the familial history of immigration, as well as the experience of being speakers of a minoritized language. Those letters, in turn, serve as a testimony of the presence of code-meshing, as well as that of multiple features of Asturian language, in the text of the letters.

A new corpus of geolocated ASR transcripts from Germany

AbstractThis report describes the Corpus of German Speech (CoGS), a 56-million-word corpus of automatic speech recognition transcripts from YouTube channels of local government entities in Germany. Transcripts have been annotated with latitude and longitude coordinates, making the resource potentially useful for geospatial analyses of lexical, morpho-syntactic, and pragmatic variation; this is exemplified with an exploratory geospatial analysis of grammatical variation in the encoding of past temporal reference. Additional corpus metadata include video identifiers and timestamps on individual word tokens, making it possible to search for specific discourse content or utterance sequences in the corpus and download the underlying video and audio from the web, using open-source tools. The discourse content of the transcripts in CoGS touches upon a wide range of topics, making the resource potentially interesting as a data source for research in digital humanities and social science. The report also briefly discusses the permissibility of reuse of data sourced from German municipalities for corpus-building purposes in the context of EU, German, and American law, which clearly authorize such a use case.

Future of Food Computing: Deepening the Scope by Broadening the Network

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using food data in various areas of computer science. Food, as a fundamental necessity for human sustenance, undergoes complex processes from farm to fork, involving physical, biological, intellectual and emotional dimensions. The need to ensure the effective and sustainable functioning of global food systems, while addressing human and environmental challenges, necessitates the development of food computing. But the question remains: How should food computing evolve to address fundamental issues in the food systems? While global sharing of data, information andknowledge is a way forward, we propose to increase the effectiveness of this sharing by transcending narrow disciplinary boundaries and engaging a wider range of stakeholders to address practical challengesfacing human society. We argue that food computing requires a multidisciplinary approach that is expansive in both scope and effectiveness. We envision a future where food computing serves as a comprehensive computational infrastructure for all aspects of food, including its production, consumption, and impact on individuals and the environment. The field of Food Computing is highly relevant to Digital Humanities (DH) researchers. By actively engaging in this area, DH researchers can make substantial contributions and shape the trajectory of future food systems, taking into account the intricate interplay of cultural, social and ethical complexities.

Finding environmental discourse in historical newspapers: a topic model workflow for query disambiguation


 
 
 Digitized historical newspapers are a treasure trove of information for our understanding of the past. As one popular application, the frequencies of query matches can be used to understand the prevalence of some discourse in a historical era. This requires the construction good queries: broad enough to capture diverse contexts and narrow enough to exclude irrelevant ones. For historical research in digital humanities, targeted queries that emphasize precision have been advised. In this paper, we develop an alternative approach, by using broad queries to cast a wider net and then using topic models built on the match contexts to filter out irrelevant matches. Specifically, we look for contexts discussing environmental issues throughout the 20th century using a corpus of two Australian newspapers. We report on a comparison of iteratively constructed narrow and broad queries and their precision and recall, and find our approach to discover roughly 7-10x more matches with a comparable level of accuracy. This combined approach can work well for focussed research projects where deliberate query construction and qualitative feedback on the results is feasible.
 
 

Perspectives on sustainable dislocated digital research resources

In difficult times, researchers often react promptly and adapt to a new situation, still focusing on the core values. In the upheavals of technology, researchers in Digital Humanities have also created innovative solutions. However, significant issues are associated with sustainable ingredients. First, software often emerges and disappears, leaving valuable data in the wild or causing costs in maintaining technological competences in the organization. Second, storing databases that have reached the end-of-life stage remains an unresolved issue. Third, knowledge and data can be closed inside a database and are often inaccessible to all. Finally, Digital Humanities must play a crucial role as a supporter of a sustainable world by rethinking its approaches. This paper uses ENCODE (an Erasmus+ funded project to bridge the gap between training and digital competences in the teaching/learning domain of ancient writing cultures) as a case study to examine some of the aforementioned issues.

Identifying social norm violation in movie plots: from Borat to American Pie

Abstract The violation of social norms in TV and cinema is a well-known source of humor and catharsis, and researchers in digital humanities may benefit from the automatic identification of social norm violations. In this article, we introduce a novel methodology for identifying and analyzing the violation of social norms in textual data and illustrate it in the analysis of movie plots. The methodology leans on zero-shot classification, specifically relevant when massive, labeled datasets are unavailable. We test our methodology and provide researchers with (1) a theoretically grounded tool for screening textual data for social norm violation and with new datasets that include (2) 6,806 embarrassing situations from movie plots and their hypothesized violated norm and (3) 3,059 movie plots with their average embarrassment score.

Security Culture as an Expression of Values

As digital technology rapidly evolves, researchers in the Digital Humanities (DH) face the challenge of securing their work and protecting stakeholders across the research life cycle. Security practices, encompassing data integrity, software assurance, and authenticated access, must align with the values of openness, transparency, and collaboration that underpin scholarly research. The increasing sophistication of cyber threats, coupled with the politicization of research and the rise of autocratic governments, necessitates a holistic approach to security that considers both cyber and physical dimensions. This paper explores the intersection of security culture and DH research, emphasizing the importance of trust, informed consent, and ethical collaboration. It argues that security practices should be user-centric, participatory, and transparent, reflecting the values and goals of researchers and participants. By integrating security best practices into research methods, scholars can mitigate risks, protect research assets, and ensure the continued availability and impact of scholarship in a world where threats are constantly evolving.

What We Did Then and What We Do Now: A Crisis of Digital Scholarship Champions at Binghamton University

The digital scholarship department in Binghamton University’s libraries was created in 2018 as part of a larger effort to bring digital humanities (DH) efforts to Binghamton. The initiative was largely spearheaded by one person who became one of the biggest digital scholarship (DS) champions on campus. They, along with the new DS librarian, founded a Digital Humanities Research Institute igniting the creation of smaller working groups and initiatives across campus. Our article discusses the role of DS champions on Binghamton’s campus, including the types of advantages they were able to leverage, their interests and goals for a DS community, and what happens when they leave. Champions are a well-researched phenomenon in business and health sciences spaces, but there is sparse research on DS champions, despite the fact they often share characteristics with champions’ roles in those areas. Understanding more about who champions are and what drives them would help DS communities plan for building sustainable and robust communities should their champions leave or no longer be able to participate in the communities they built.

Consolidating the theoretical foundations of digital human resource management acceptance and use research: a meta-analytic validation of UTAUT

AbstractWith rapid technological progress, the adoption of digital technology in human resource management (HRM) has become a crucial step towards the vision of digital organizations. Over the last four decades, a substantial body of empirical research has been dedicated towards explaining the phenomenon of digital HRM. Moreover, research has applied a wide array of theories, constructs, and measures to explain the adoption of digital HRM in organizations. The results are fragmented theoretical foundations and inconsistent empirical evaluations. We provide a comprehensive overview of theories applied in digital HRM adoption research and propose an adjusted version of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology as a consolidating theory to explain adoption across settings. We empirically validate this theory by combining evidence from 134 primary studies yielding 768 effect sizes via meta-analytic structural equation modelling. Moderator analyses assessing the influence of research setting and sample on effects show significant differences between private and public sector. Findings highlight research opportunities for future studies and implications for practitioners.

Co-Created and Student-led Teaching Materials

Undergraduate students' research experience is important as it allows them to gain the necessary skills required for future opportunities. Affording students various opportunities to work with faculty on research during their undergraduate degree provides a rich learning opportunity. This paper advocates for student and faculty partnerships at the undergraduate level, where students and faculty work collaboratively. ITA235, Cucina Italiana: Italian History and Culture Through Food (University of Toronto Mississauga) acts as a model for student-led research, which includes a large component of student and faculty collaboration. The FOODWAYS project is a teaching resource currently being developed, and is housed within the course as an Experiential Learning (EL) opportunity. Through participating in the FOODWAYS research project, students have exposure to various digital humanities research methods and work in partnership with faculty and graduate student researchers to broaden their research skill set.

Text Mining of Twitter data for Mapping the Digital Humanities Research Trends

Digital humanities have become a more relevant field of study due to the extraordinary growth in digitisation of the humanities data. Due to collaborative development of humanities and computing, many academics are convinced of the worth of digital humanities (DH) that actually provides the best insight into humanities studies. The panoramic view of the development of big data in humanities reflects its trendy directions and evoked new challenges in DH. It is complicated to analysed the objectives of digital humanities data with simple data analysis tools where as text mining can help to facilitate the qualitative findings in DH. In the humanities disciplines, data is often in the form of unstructured and text mining is a way of structuring and analysing digitised text-as-data. Twitter is a online social networking platform which offers an opportunity for quality information sharing, collaborative participation digital humanities community. This paper is attempted to study the extensibility of digital humanities on twitter and also to interpret the evolution of twitter usage by analysing tweets posted related to DH via python data analysis.

An Investigation in the Interdisciplinary Nature of Digital Humanities

The disciplinary structure and dimensions of digital humanities is evolving for many years. Even though several journals focus solely on digital humanities, the interdisciplinary nature of digital humanities remains a fact. The current study is an endeavor to understand the linkage of the digital humanities with other disciplines in the universe of knowledge so that researchers from multiple subject backgrounds can carry out research on digital humanities in a more vivid manner. The present research will prove valuable for researchers, authors, and decision-makers of research and development organisations and other institutions to carry out collaborative research activities on individual and organisational levels. The research results and discussions of this research publication will enlighten the researchers from the digital humanities subject field to take a decision in a better way regarding the evolution and interdisciplinary research activities in digital humanities and the incorporation of methods and techniques from library and information science and computer science to expand the horizons of the subject field (digital humanities). The author conducted a bibliometric analysis focusing on the objectives to discover linkages and an interdisciplinary approach to digital humanities. The results infer that the highest number of authors active in research activities in the digital humanities belong to computer science followed by art and humanities and library and information science disciplines. The journals preferred for publication of research on digital humanities are also analysed, and it is found that the highest number of journals are from the literature discipline, followed by art & humanities, computer science, history, and library and information science. The publication productivity of journals is also studied, and it is found that “Digital Scholarship in the Humanities” is the most productive journal and that it belongs to the humanities discipline. In the list of the top ten most productive journals, five belong to the discipline of Library and information science. The study of citation and bibliographic coupling displays that the journals “Journal of Documentation” and “Digital Scholarship in the Humanities” are the most cited journals. During this research endeavor, emphasis is given to the subject affiliation of authors, journals and publications. It’s been found that digital humanities research is actively related to the disciplines of library and information science and computer science.

Knowledge Production through Open Data for Digital Humanities

The study examines how open data can be used to generate meaningful insights into the cultural, historical, and geographical features of India and can be the best tool for digital humanities researchers, allowing them to access large datasets about the country’s diverse landscape and interpret the data in meaningful and creative ways. An attempt is made to explore the potential of open data in digital humanities projects and discuss the need to create a comprehensive digital humanities platform that caters to the needs of different stakeholders as well as the advantages and challenges of open data and government initiatives in digital humanities. Additionally, the implications of open data and government initiatives in terms of improving access to digital humanities resources, increasing collaboration, and enhancing the quality of digital humanities projects and their contribution to creating a vibrant digital humanities community in India. The paper concludes that open data can be a powerful tool for digital humanities researchers in India, allowing them to access large datasets about the country’s diverse landscape and to interpret the data in meaningful and creative ways.

A Survey of the Metadata Element Sets Used for Digital Art Objects in the Online Collections of the Museums of India

Digital technology advancements have had a significant impact on how people learn, search for information, and evaluate it. Indian cultural heritage institutions like GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) have also embraced a number of digitisation initiatives to increase access to their wide-ranging art collections. Digital paintings and other cultural heritage information artifacts can facilitate digital humanities research in multiple ways. Using an online content analysis and observation method, this study looks at how metadata elements are used to describe the different art collections in five national museums in India. The study finds that 13 categories of art objects are made available by all the museums. Each category is described by a different number of metadata entry elements. The study also finds the metadata elements that different museums prefer for different types of art objects, as well as the common elements. The findings highlight the need for standardisation in metadata practices to improve the discoverability and accessibility of cultural objects and show how crucial metadata is in facilitating access to cultural objects. The results could help GLAMs create metadata guidelines and strategies for their digital collections, which would make digital art objects more discoverable and accessible.

Components of Digital Humanities in Indian LIS Curricula

Digital Humanities (DH) is an interdisciplinary academic discipline that employs computational techniques to
 address humanities and social science problems. It merges various domains such as history, philosophy, literature,
 and modern languages, offering unique approaches to traditional inquiries. DH has gained considerable popularity among students, academicians, and Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals, creating new employment opportunities in libraries, museums, archives, cultural heritage organisations, data science, and other sectors. In India, DH is still in its early stages, with diverse manifestations in university-level teaching and learning practices. This study examines the DH components integrated into the LIS course curriculum by analysing syllabi and course descriptions from central universities. Additionally, we briefly review DH research projects and programs in India and abroad. To enhance the design and implementation of DH programs and degrees alongside LIS curricula, a course module for DH within LIS schools is proposed. This research extends insights into DH pedagogical practices within librarianship education, offering a comprehensive perspective on contextual frameworks, academic discussions, development trends in DH, and the LIS field in India.