Search results

Digital humanities database is one of the essential tools in digital humanities research area. Therefore, examining the usage of digital humanities database in academic papers is conducive to assessing the value of digital humanities database for scientific research activities and improving the construction of digital humanities infrastructure.

This paper constructs an evaluation system of digital humanities database from the perspective of academic influence and social influence, with mention frequency, usage motivation, platform access data, usage region and usage discipline as indicators and takes China Biographical Database Project as the empirical object to explore the usage of digital humanities database in China.

The data analysis result demonstrates that digital humanities databases are widely used and recognized in China. However, the problem of low actual usage remains.

This paper constructs the digital humanistic database's evaluation system and discusses applying the digital humanistic database in China, which provides a new perspective and method for the influence evaluation study of the digital humanistic database.

This study aims to develop a hierarchical topic analysis tool (HTAT) based on hierarchical Latent Dirichelet allocation (hLDA) to support digital humanities research that is associated with the need of topic exploration on the Digital Humanities Platform for Mr. Lo Chia-Lun’s Writings (DHP-LCLW). HTAT can assist humanities scholars on distant reading with analysis of hierarchical text topics, through classifying time-stamped texts into multiple historical eras, conducting hierarchical topic modeling (HTM) according to the texts from different eras and presenting through visualization. The comparative network diagram is another function provided to assist humanities scholars in comparing the difference in the topics they wish to explore and to track how the concept of a topic changes over time from a particular perspective. In addition, HTAT can also provide humanities scholars with the feature to view source texts, thus having high potential to be applied in promoting the effectiveness of topic exploration due to simultaneously integrating both the topic exploration functions of distant reading and close reading.

This study adopts a counterbalanced experimental design to examine whether there is significant differences in the effectiveness of topic inquiry, the number of relevant topics inquired and the time spent on them when research participants were alternately conducting text exploration using DHP-LCLW with HTAT or DHP-LCLW with Single-layer Topic Analysis Tool (SLTAT). A technology acceptance questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were also conducted to understand the research participants' perception and feelings toward using the two different tools to assist topic inquiry.

The experimental results show that DHP-LCLW with HTAT could better assist the research participants, in comparison with DHP-LCLW with SLTAT, to grasp the topic context of the texts from two particular perspectives assigned by this study within a short period. In addition, the results of the interviews revealed that DHP-LCLW with HTAT, in comparison with SLTAT, was able to provide a topic terms that better met research participnats' expectations and needs, and effectively guided them to the corresponding texts for close reading. In the analysis of technology acceptance and interview data, it can be found that the research participants have a high and positive tendency toward using DHP-LCLW with HTAT to assist topic inquiry.

The Jieba Chinese word segmentation system was used in the Mr. Lo Chia-Lun’s Writings Database in this study, to perform word segmentation on Mr. Lo Chia-Lun’s writing texts for topic modeling based on hLDA. Since Jieba word segmentation system is a lexicon based word segmentation system, it cannot identify new words that have still not been collected in the lexicon well. In this case, the correctness of word segmentation on the target texts will affect the results of hLDA topic modeling, and the effectiveness of HTAT in assisting humanities scholars for topic inquiry.

An HTAT was developed to support digital humanities research in this study. With HTAT, DHP-LCLW provides hmanities scholars with topic clues from different hierarchical perspectives for textual exploration, and with temporal and comparative network diagrams to assist humanities scholars in tracking the evolution of the topics of specific perspectives over time, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the overall context of the texts.

In recent years, topic analysis technology that can automatically extract key topic information from a large amount of texts has been developed rapidly, but the topics generated from traditional topic analysis models like LDA (Latent Dirichelet allocation) make it difficult for users to understand the differences in the topics of texts with different hierarchical levels. Thus, this study proposes HTAT which uses hLDA to build a hierarchical topic tree with a tree-like structure without the need to define the number of topics in advance, enabling humanities scholars to quickly grasp the concept of textual topics and use different hierarchical perspectives for further textual exploration. At the same time, it also provides a combination function of temporal division and comparative network diagram to assist humanities scholars in exploring topics and their changes in different eras, which helps them discover more useful research clues or findings.

The purpose of this paper is to dissect key issues and debates in digital humanities, an emerging field of theory and practice. Digital humanities stands greatly to impact the Information and Library Science (ILS) professions (and vice versa) as well as the traditional humanities disciplines.

This paper explores the contours of digital humanities as a field, touching upon fundamental issues related to the field’s coalescence and thus to its structure and epistemology. It looks at the ways in which digital humanities brings new approaches and sheds new light on manifold humanities foci.

Digital humanities work represents a vital new current of interdisciplinary, collaborative intellectual activity both in- and outside the academy; it merits particular attention from ILS.

This paper helps potential stakeholders understand the intellectual and practical framework of the digital humanities and “its relationship” to their own intellectual and professional work.

This paper critically synthesizes previous scholarly work in digital humanities. It has particular value for those in ILS, a community that has proven especially receptive to the field, as well as to scholars working in many humanities disciplines. Digital humanities has already made an important impact on both LIS and the humanities; its impact is sure to grow.

Digital humanities research platform for biographies of Malaysia personalities (DHRP-BMP) was collaboratively developed by the Research Center for Chinese Cultural Subjectivity in Taiwan, the Federation of Heng Ann Association Malaysia, and the Malaysian Chinese Research Center of Universiti Malaya in this study. Using The Biographies of Malaysia Henghua Personalities as the main archival sources, DHRP-BMP adopted the Omeka S, which is a next-generation Web publishing platform for institutions interested in connecting digital cultural heritage collections with other resources online, as the basic development system of the platform, to develop the functions of close reading and distant reading both combined together as the foundation of its digital humanities tools.

The results of the first-stage development are introduced in this study, and a case study of qualitative analysis is provided to describe the research process by a humanist scholar who used DHRP-BMP to discover the character relationships and contexts hidden in The Biographies of Malaysia Henghua Personalities.

Close reading provided by DHRP-BMP was able to support humanities scholars on comprehending full text contents through a user-friendly reading interface while distant reading developed in DHRP-BMP could assist humanities scholars on interpreting texts from a rather macro perspective through text analysis, with the functions such as keyword search, geographic information and social networks analysis for humanities scholars to master on the character relationships and geographic distribution from personality biographies, thus accelerating their text interpretation efficiency and uncovering the hidden context.

At present, a digital humanities research platform with real-time characters’ relationships analysis tool that can automatically generate visualized character relationship graphs based on Chinese named entity recognition (CNER) and character relationship identification technologies to effectively assist humanities scholars in interpreting characters’ relationships for digital humanities research is still lacking so far. This study thus presents the DHRP-BMP that offers the key features that can automatically identify characters’ names and characters’ relationships from personality biographies and provide a user-friendly visualization interface of characters’ relationships for supporting digital humanities research, so that humanities scholars could more efficiently and accurately explore characters’ relationships from the analyzed texts to explore complicated characters’ relationships and find out useful research findings.

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 environments of the library under open access (OA) are distinctively found as less expensive which ultimately reciprocates better services and technological support for the users as well. Focussing on the Librarians’ perspective, the purpose of the study is to highlight and establish a balance between the vision of OA initiatives and the support of Librarians in India. The principal and philosophy of the study are based upon the exploration of open source initiatives and their significance among the Library & Information Science community.

The study reflects the historical perspective of OA in India and around the world. The study further focusses on how the OA movement has taken a leap in adaptability by the librarians on the basis of acceptance model given. Considering the reviews of the librarians, the study reflects the librarians support OA initiatives in India. OA is a “provocation to thought”, it is a “social contract”.

Exploring beyond the researchers have come across that OA is a belief where knowledge evolves best when shared. Based on the acceptance the study given significant. It describes the librarian’s attitude while embracing the OA model with an increased acceptance towards OA, which supports in building Institutional Repositories and broadening the research horizons based on budgetary implications. The librarians and libraries adopt and work to build up a resilient model for OA to bring out awareness among the users.

The scope of the study is limited to Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. The focus of the study is purposely laid down on the three given states of India keeping in mind Delhi being a capital city of India, Uttar Pradesh being the largest state of India (area wise) and Haryana state, which opened up multiple educational opportunities for the students and researchers Rajiv Gandhi Educational city plans to host many educational institutions including medical and engineering institutions.

The study describes the librarian’s attitude while embracing the OA model with an increased acceptance towards the OA, which supports in building Institutional Repositories and broadening the research horizons based on budgetary implications. The librarians and libraries adopt and work to build up a resilient model for OA to bring out awareness among the users.

The present study brings out the need of different policies and mandates by Government of India for OA along with University Grants Commission, National Knowledge Commission and Research Organisation to promote the culture of OA. The study further recommends that LIS communities come together and build the learning culture to promote limitless sharing of information and knowledge for scholarly society.

This research work aims to make a difference in highlighting the librarians’ support on OA initiatives in India due to the role of librarians on transitional point. Dissemination and management of information using digital technology during pandemic have had a significant impact on divided environment. With this paradigm shift, the world struggles with the pandemic. The librarians try to keep themselves in pace by embracing the technology and LIS professionals do adopt the radical reventure the info technology.

This study examined the extent to which public academic libraries in South Africa coped with the changing information environment by using competitive intelligence (CI) to attain competitiveness.

The study adopted positivism as the main philosophical lens and also incorporated qualitative elements to augment the quantitative data through a survey research design. Questionnaires were e-mailed to 25 directors of public academic libraries in South Africa and 17 were returned, yielding a 68% response rate. Attempts were made to reach to the 25 directors through semi-structured telephonic interviews, and only eight responded some through their representatives, yielding a 32% response rate. Using two instruments permitted the triangulation of data. A noted limitation of the study is that some library directors neither responded to the questionnaire nor the interview.

Findings revealed that various competitive intelligence techniques were employed; however, their implementation was not formalised. Competitiveness was driven by various factors such as rivalries in the information value chain; relevance; financial and budgetary constraints; changing user expectations and evolving technology.

This study is novel because there is a dearth of literature on implementation and use of competitive intelligence in academic libraries in South Africa.

An automatic text annotation system (ATAS) that can collect resources from different databases through Linked Data (LD) for automatically annotating ancient texts was developed in this study to support digital humanities research. It allows the humanists referring to resources from diverse databases when interpreting ancient texts as well as provides a friendly text annotation reader for humanists interpreting ancient text through reading. The paper aims to discuss whether the ATAS is helpful to support digital humanities research or not.

Based on the quasi-experimental design, the ATAS developed in this study and MARKUS semi-ATAS were compared whether the significant differences in the reading effectiveness and technology acceptance for supporting humanists interpreting ancient text of the Ming dynasty’s collections existed or not. Additionally, lag sequential analysis was also used to analyze users’ operation behaviors on the ATAS. A semi-structured in-depth interview was also applied to understand users’ opinions and perception of using the ATAS to interpret ancient texts through reading.

The experimental results reveal that the ATAS has higher reading effectiveness than MARKUS semi-ATAS, but not reaching the statistically significant difference. The technology acceptance of the ATAS is significantly higher than that of MARKUS semi-ATAS. Particularly, the function comparison of the two systems shows that the ATAS presents more perceived ease of use on the functions of term search, connection to source websites and adding annotation than MARKUS semi-ATAS. Furthermore, the reading interface of ATAS is simple and understandable and is more suitable for reading than MARKUS semi-ATAS. Among all the considered LD sources, Moedict, which is an online Chinese dictionary, was confirmed as the most helpful one.

This study adopted Jieba Chinese parser to perform the word segmentation process based on a parser lexicon for the Chinese ancient texts of the Ming dynasty’s collections. The accuracy of word segmentation to a lexicon-based Chinese parser is limited due to ignoring the grammar and semantics of ancient texts. Moreover, the original parser lexicon used in Jieba Chinese parser only contains the modern words. This will reduce the accuracy of word segmentation for Chinese ancient texts. The two limitations that affect Jieba Chinese parser to correctly perform the word segmentation process for Chinese ancient texts will significantly affect the effectiveness of using ATAS to support digital humanities research. This study thus proposed a practicable scheme by adding new terms into the parser lexicon based on humanists’ self-judgment to improve the accuracy of word segmentation of Jieba Chinese parser.

Although some digital humanities platforms have been successfully developed to support digital humanities research for humanists, most of them have still not provided a friendly digital reading environment to support humanists on interpreting texts. For this reason, this study developed an ATAS that can automatically retrieve LD sources from different databases on the Internet to supply rich annotation information on reading texts to help humanists interpret texts. This study brings digital humanities research to a new ground.

This study proposed a novel ATAS that can automatically annotate useful information on an ancient text to increase the readability of the ancient text based on LD sources from different databases, thus helping humanists obtain a deeper and broader understanding in the ancient text. Currently, there is no this kind of tool developed for humanists to support digital humanities research.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a retrospective bibliometric analysis of documents about digital humanities, an emerging but interdisciplinary movement. It examines the distribution of research outputs and languages, identifies the active journals and institutions, dissects the network of categories and cited references, and interprets the hot research topics.

The source data are derived from the Web of Science (WoS) core collection. To reveal the holistic landscape of this field, VOSviewer and CiteSpace as popular visualization tools are employed to process the bibliographic data including author, category, reference, and keyword. Furthermore, the parameter design of the visualization tools follows the general procedures and methods for bibliometric analysis.

There is an obviously rapid growth in digital humanities research. English is still the leading academic language in this field. The most influential authors all come from or have scientific relationships with Europe and North America, and two leading countries of which are the UK and USA. Digital humanities is the result of a dynamic dialogue between humanistic exploration and digital means. This research field is closely associated with history, literary and cultural heritage, and information and library science.

This analysis relies on the metadata information extracted from the WoS database; however, some valuable literatures in the field of digital humanities may not be retrieved from the database owing to the inherent challenge of topic search. This study is also restricted by the scope of publications, the limitation regarding the source of data is that WoS database may have underrepresented publications in this domain.

The output of this paper could be a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners interesting in the knowledge domain of digital humanities. Moreover, the conclusions of this retrospective analysis can be deemed as the comparable foundation for future study.