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Digital humanities (DH) has become a much discussed topic among both humanities scholars and library professionals. The library and information science (LIS) community has taken efforts in providing new facilities and developing new services to meet humanities scholars’ changing research behaviors and needs employing digital tools and methods. How to effectively collaborate with the DH community has been a challenging task to LIS in their digital library (DL) development endeavors. The purpose of this paper is to discover productive ways for LIS to support DH scholarship, specifically, what DL components, including content, technology, and service, should and could be developed for digital humanists.

As an initial effort of the Digital Humanities Interest Group at University of California, Irvine Libraries, the examination is primarily based on a cross-boundary environmental scan in both DH and DL fields. The environmental survey includes both a literature review and web and physical site visits. The survey results, especially a gap analysis between the behaviors and needs of humanities scholars and the digital content, technologies, and services currently offered by the DL community, are used to shape the proposed roles of DH librarianship.

First, DH’s innovative approach to research and teaching practices brings opportunities and challenges. Second, DH research is collaborative work. Third, major channels are established for the DH community. Fourth, various tools and data sets are developed to support different types of projects. Fifth, DH community has unbalanced geographical and disciplinary distribution. Sixth, DH research output still lacks attention, integration, and sustainability. Finally, LIS professionals play unique roles in DH projects. Overall, the communities of DH and DL share common goals and tasks.

This paper proposes these present and future roles of LIS professionals: creator and contributor; curator; messenger and liaison; educator; mediator and interpreter; host; partner; innovator; “hybrid scholar”; advocate; consultant. At the organizational level, libraries should demonstrate higher efficiency and effectiveness in the services by revamping organizational culture or structure to stimulate and realize more and deeper cross-boundary conversations and collaborations. On a larger scale, the DL community should strive to become more visible, valuable, and approachable to the DH community; and even better, become part of it.

This paper examines both DH and DL fields critically and connects the two communities by discovering gaps and commonalities. Based on the findings, the authors recommend roles and actions to be taken by LIS professionals, libraries, and the DL community. This paper is valuable to both humanities scholars who are seeking support in their research using digital methods and LIS professionals who are interested in providing more effective and suitable services. The paper also helps library administrators and aspiring librarians better understand the concept of DH and grasp insight on the present and future of DH librarianship.

This study aims to explore knowledge structure and research trends in the domain of digital humanities (DH) in the recent decade. The study identified prevailing topics and then, analyzed trends of such topics over time in the DH field.

Research bibliographic data in the area of DH were collected from scholarly databases. Multiple text mining techniques were used to identify prevailing research topics and trends, such as keyword co-occurrences, bigram analysis, structural topic models and bi-term topic models.

Term-level analysis revealed that cultural heritage, geographic information, semantic web, linked data and digital media were among the most popular topics in the recent decade. Structural topic models identified that linked open data, text mining, semantic web and ontology, text digitization and social network analysis received increased attention in the DH field.

This study applied existent text mining techniques to understand the research domain in DH. The study collected a large set of bibliographic text, representing the area of DH from multiple academic databases and explored research trends based on structural topic models.

With the rapid development of digital humanities, some digital humanities platforms have been successfully developed to support digital humanities research for humanists. However, most of them have still not provided a friendly digital reading environment and practicable social network analysis tool to support humanists on interpreting texts and exploring characters’ social network relationships. Moreover, the advancement of digitization technologies for the retrieval and use of Chinese ancient books is arising an unprecedented challenge and opportunity. For these reasons, this paper aims to present a Chinese ancient books digital humanities research platform (CABDHRP) to support historical China studies. In addition to providing digital archives, digital reading, basic search and advanced search functions for Chinese ancient books, this platform still provides two novel functions that can more effectively support digital humanities research, including an automatic text annotation system (ATAS) for interpreting texts and a character social network relationship map tool (CSNRMT) for exploring characters’ social network relationships.

This study adopted DSpace, an open-source institutional repository system, to serve as a digital archives system for archiving scanned images, metadata, and full texts to develop the CABDHRP for supporting digital humanities (DH) research. Moreover, the ATAS developed in the CABDHRP used the Node.js framework to implement the system’s front- and back-end services, as well as application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by different databases, such as China Biographical Database (CBDB) and TGAZ, used to retrieve the useful linked data (LD) sources for interpreting ancient texts. Also, Neo4j which is an open-source graph database management system was used to implement the CSNRMT of the CABDHRP. Finally, JavaScript and jQuery were applied to develop a monitoring program embedded in the CABDHRP to record the use processes from humanists based on xAPI (experience API). To understand the research participants’ perception when interpreting the historical texts and characters’ social network relationships with the support of ATAS and CSNRMT, semi-structured interviews with 21 research participants were conducted.

An ATAS embedded in the reading interface of CABDHRP can collect resources from different databases through LD for automatically annotating ancient texts to support digital humanities research. It allows the humanists to refer to resources from diverse databases when interpreting ancient texts, as well as provides a friendly text annotation reader for humanists to interpret ancient text through reading. Additionally, the CSNRMT provided by the CABDHRP can semi-automatically identify characters’ names based on Chinese word segmentation technology and humanists’ support to confirm and analyze characters’ social network relationships from Chinese ancient books based on visualizing characters’ social networks as a knowledge graph. The CABDHRP not only can stimulate humanists to explore new viewpoints in a humanistic research, but also can promote the public to emerge the learning interest and awareness of Chinese ancient books.

This study proposed a novel CABDHRP that provides the advanced features, including the automatic word segmentation of Chinese text, automatic Chinese text annotation, semi-automatic character social network analysis and user behavior analysis, that are different from other existed digital humanities platforms. Currently, there is no this kind of digital humanities platform developed for humanists to support digital humanities research.

Digital humanities (DH) is a scholarly lens through which computing methods and technological tools are used for the research of humanistic disciplines. The purpose of this study is to identify the current practicing situation of DH in the university libraries of Bangladesh.

Survey methods were used for gathering data using a well-structured questionnaire. The websites of different universities national and international organizations, and DH-related websites from different corners of the globe were also used for the gathering of data and information.

The findings revealed that there are some hindrances to practicing DH, such as lack of IT skills, funds and problems with intellectual property rights act practicing and provided some suitable suggestions for the advancement of DH in the university libraries of Bangladesh.

The outcome of this paper might be a valuable reference tool for researchers and professionals of the DH discipline. The insights and views of the respondents regarding computational tools and technologies obtained from this study are original and unique in nature.

The purpose of this paper is to study the relevance of heritage collections and the convergence of methodologies and standards traditionally linked to Library and Information Science (LIS) in the development of digital humanities (DH) research in Spain.

This paper is based on a systematic review of scientific publications that are representative of DH in Spain and were published between 2013 and 2018. The analysis considered doctoral theses, journal articles and conference papers.

The results highlight the synergies between documentary heritage, LIS and DH. However, it appears that there is a scarcity of scientific literature to support the confluence of LIS and DH and a limited formal connection between heritage institutions and the areas of academia that reuse and enrich these source collections.

The review of representative scholarly DH publications was mainly based on the metadata that describe the content of articles, thesis and conference papers. This work relies on the thematic indexing (descriptors and keywords) of the analysed documents but their level of quality and consistency is very diverse.

The topic of the study has not been explored before and this work could contribute to the international debate on the interrelation and complementarity between LIS and DH. In addition, this paper shows the contribution that standards and documentary methodologies make to projects in which technology is applied to humanities disciplines. The authors propose that there is an urgent need to strengthen the “scientific relationships” between heritage institutions, as well as enhancing links between the academic field of DH and LIS in order to improve teaching and research strategies in conjunction.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the structure, patterns and themes of cross-national collaborations in Digital Humanities research through the application of social network analysis and visualization tools.

The sample includes articles containing Digital Humanities research in the Web of Science Core Collection as of December 2018. First, co-occurrence data representing collaborations among nations were extracted from author affiliations. Second, the descriptive statistics, network indicators and international communities were calculated. Third, the research topics of different cross-national collaboration communities based on ISI keywords, author keywords, title and abstracts were detected.

The results show that the scope of international collaborations in Digital Humanities research is broad, but the distribution among nations is unbalanced. The USA, Germany and England were identified as the major contributors. Five research communities are identified, led by the USA, Germany, England, Belgium and France. The communities share common research topics such as history, GIS, text mining, visualization, while each has its own research emphasis.

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

This paper seeks to provide a description and reflection on some of the structural problems and challenges faced when developing a digital humanities (DH) project in a Mexican public university.

As DH is a relatively new field and practice in Mexican academia, this article is based on a case study of developing the Biblioteca Digital de Pensamiento Novohispano (Digital Library of New Hispanic Thought). This is one of the few DH at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the largest public university in the country.

It was found that there were three central problems for developing a DH project in a Mexican public university: existing technical knowledge and abilities at the UNAM will be challenged by DH projects; projects are the place to train human resources in DH methodology; and researchers need to consider different long‐term infrastructure and hosting solutions, with or without using institutional infrastructure, at the same time researches need to work within the institution to establish a specific policy for research projects.

The paper concludes that the structure, goals and products of DH projects need to be modified and expanded in order to also consider alternative goals and products such as: proposals of institutional policy, creation of infrastructure and academic and student training. DH projects must be regarded as disruptive, that is that the project needs to assume rupture as a part of the project itself.

The experience of innovation and disruption is not necessarily the same in all fields and all institutions. This article documents for the first time the particular experiences of a public university in a developing country with DH projects. It has been found that the delay in using computers in the humanities in Mexico has led to the development of a specific paradox: a gap between institutional interest and disposition in the use of computers in humanities, and the lack of DH culture in those who have to develop the project.

This study aims to update and extend previous efforts gauging the status of the quickly evolving field of digital humanities (DH). Based on a sample of directly relevant DH literature during 2005–2020 from Web of Science, the study conducts a longitudinal examination of the research output, intellectual structures and contributors.

The study applies bibliometric methods, social network analysis and visualization tools to conduct a longitudinal examination.

The research output and scope of DH topics has grown over time with a widening and deepening field in four major development stages. Through both term frequency and term co-occurrence relationship networks, this study further identifies four major reoccurring topics and themes of DH research: (1) collections and contents; (2) technologies, techniques, theories and methods; (3) collaboration, interdisciplinarity and support and (4) DH evolution. Finally, leading DH research contributors (authors, institutions and nations) are also identified.

This study utilizes a greater number of and richer subject sources than previous efforts to identify the overall intellectual structures of DH research based on key terms from titles, abstracts and author keywords. It expands on previous efforts and furthers our understanding of DH research with more recent DH literature and richer subject sources from the literature.

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.

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.

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.

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