Digital humanities research: interdisciplinary collaborations, themes and implications to library and information science

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the structure, patterns and themes of interdisciplinary collaborations in the digital humanities (DH) research through the application of social network analysis and visualization tools.

Design/methodology/approach

The sample includes articles containing DH research in the Web of Science Core Collection as of December 2018. First, co-occurrence data representing collaborations among disciplinary were extracted from the subject category. Second, the descriptive statistics, network indicators and interdisciplinary communities were calculated. Third, the research topics of different interdisciplinary collaboration communities based on system keywords, author keywords, title and abstracts were detected.

Findings

The findings reveal that while the scope of disciplines involved in DH research is broad and evolving over time, most interdisciplinary collaborations are concentrated among several disciplines, including computer science, library and information science, linguistics and literature. The study further uncovers some communities based on closely collaborating disciplines and the evolving nature of such interdisciplinary collaboration communities over time. To better understand the close collaboration ties, the study traces and analyzes the research topics and themes of the interdisciplinary communities. Finally, the implications of the findings for DH research are discussed.

Originality/value

This study applied various informetric methods and tools to reveal the collaboration structure, patterns and themes among disciplinaries in DH research.

Citation

Su, F., Zhang, Y. and Immel, Z. (2021), "Digital humanities research: interdisciplinary collaborations, themes and implications to library and information science", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 77 No. 1, pp. 143-161. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2020-0072