Search results

The purpose of this article is to investigate attempts to safeguard classical humanism in secondary schools by appealing to a cultural-historical link with Antiquity, voiced in the face of educational reforms in Sweden between 1865 and 1971.

By focusing on the content of the pedagogical journal Pedagogisk Tidskrift, the article highlights a number of examples of how an ancient historical lineage was evoked and how historical knowledge was mobilized and contested in various ways.

The article argues that the enduring negotiation over the educational need to maintain a strong link with the ancient past was strained due to increasing scholarly specialization and thus entangled in competing views on reform and what was deemed “traditional” or “modern”.

From a larger perspective, the conflict over the role of Antiquity in Swedish secondary schools reveals a trajectory for the history of education as part of and later apart from a general history of the humanities. Classical history originally served as a common past from which Swedish culture and education developed, but later lost this integrating function within the burgeoning discipline of Pedagogy. The findings demonstrate the value of bringing the newly (re)formed history of humanities and history of education closer together.

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.

One potential lesson to be learned from the academic “culture wars” of the past few decades, regardless of which position one prefers, is that the humanities as a discipline continue to matter, perhaps more so than ever in a multi-cultural, globalized world. The systematic marginalization, even elimination, of the humanistic disciplines available represents a significant weakness for education in the Gulf; bolstering the study of the humanities – including literature, philosophy, and art history – offers a proven route towards achieving certain goals publicly avowed as priorities for education in the region. This paper proposes that engaging the humanities builds an awareness and appreciation of otherness; encourages abstract (critical) thinking; fosters language development; and, perhaps most importantly, asks students to be inspired by great ideas beautifully rendered. To become a knowledge-based society, a culture of reading deeply and independently needs to be cultivated. To empower students to become lifelong learners requires that they are, by default, lifelong readers. Furthermore, I propose that in an unsettling time of growth, change and challenges in the region, there is a reassuring possibility for humanistic inclusion that transcends the standard categories of identity politics. Students in the Gulf, just as readers everywhere else in this human world, can be shown that there is more to unite us than to divide us.

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.

A category of humanities public programming which forms a unique type of “readers' advisory” service has developed in the United States in the past 20 years. Encouraged by funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, readers' discussion groups have grown in number and variety in the 1980s. This article reviews the history of humanities public programming, explores the nature of the readers' discussion groups, and examines the effectiveness and impact of these programs.

By reconstructing the genealogy of digital humanities through examining digital humanities projects and evaluative writings, this paper aims to identify core arguments related to disciplinary transformation and pedagogy in the humanities fields. It also seeks to consider knowledge production and transformation of a general humanistic attitude (the Humanities Program) in relation to digital tools. The paper also seeks to examine its perceived impact on disciplinary development, pedagogy, and forms of digital text.

The paper presents a literature‐based conceptual analysis of distinct and diverse aspects of the enterprise of digital humanities, by identifying their main foci together with implications of these preoccupations within larger discourses. The analysis is grounded in a close reading of 45 exemplary texts published from the 1980s to date, and 14 exemplary projects and initiatives. The analysis highlights several concepts with their underlying assumptions.

The perceived epistemological advantage of digital technology for new forms of reasoning is that community development has produced theoretical frameworks and shaped practical directions. The paper identified three distinct formations characterized by associated digital artifacts: prominent opinion leaders, foundational projects, and document forms (morphs).

Research data are not comprehensive. Selected texts and projects are exemplary. The results and findings are relevant for the English‐language context and limited by a selective corpus.

The paper outlines a historical trajectory of digital humanities and the formative stages of development from the discourses of that evolving field. It also identifies constructions of technological advantage with implications for knowledge production in the writing of humanities scholars. The paper contributes to practitioner awareness of the history of digital humanities practice.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how digital resources might best be created and how the digital medium might best be exploited to serve the needs of research and teaching in the humanities.

The history of text‐based humanities computing is traced to illustrate the complexity of humanities sources and the requirements for their representation in digital form.

The paper finds that digital information is completely different from any other kind of information, being dynamic, extensible and manipulable in many different ways. It is not static and it can be manipulated in many different ways. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) has been widely adopted in the humanities particularly for full text sources encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative application. XML permits the display, analysis and manipulation of fine detail within a document. It also facilitates the chunking of information and the integration of data and metadata leading to new forms of publication that exploit the digital medium to the full.

The research environment proposed in this paper challenges current modes of working with a more innovative approach to the nature and functionality of digital representations of humanities sources.

The paper looks at the development of humanities computing and should be helpful for anyone embarking on or managing a humanities digital project.

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.

While the term “humanities” is not in itself a particularly contentious one among academics, the addition of the term “digital” creates all sorts of problems, even the superficially illogical contention that digital humanities are not humanities at all. The fundamental rupture between digital and print humanities lies in the turning of a materialist, object-oriented analysis upon the practices of humanistic scholarship. That is, in their newness, the digital humanities are unsurprisingly self-reflective about the materiality of their scholarly practices. This self-reflection has been largely absent from traditional humanities where we had all but naturalized the material composition of dissertations, journal articles, monographs, and so on. As a result, even as we continue to pursue traditional scholarly methods, it becomes increasingly difficult to do so without a self-reflective awareness of the historical-material contingency of these practices. In short, they are no longer the same. To explore this issue, this chapter takes up assemblage theory, and actor-network theory to investigate the intersection of mobile technologies and social media in the digital humanities including conference backchannels and networked research communities mediated through Twitter, Google Buzz, and similar applications. The chapter considers how, even for those who continue to publish in traditional genres on traditional subjects, the development of these digital assemblages are transforming compositional practices.

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.