Distribution features and intellectual structures of digital humanities. A bibliometric analysis
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2017-0076 |
| Published date | 08 January 2018 |
| Pages | 223-246 |
| Date | 08 January 2018 |
| Author | Qing Wang |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Distribution features and
intellectual structures of
digital humanities
A bibliometric analysis
Qing Wang
Business School, Nankai University, Tianjin, China
Abstract
Purpose –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.
Design/methodology/approach –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.
Findings –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.
Research limitations/implications –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.
Originality/value –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.
Keywords Library and information services, Digital humanities, VOSviewer, CiteSpace,
Digital cultural heritage, Digital history, Digital literary, Humanities computing, Visualization analysis
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
When one nowadays expects to understand one’s own research field, literary analysis or
otherwise, it is sensible to make use of the novel computational methods and tools and
converge them with traditional research paradigm within that field (Naukkarinen and
Bragge, 2016). Contemporary humanities research has expanded beyond anything that
could be considered traditional, digital humanities is the umbrella term that describes much
of this kind of work (Varner and Hswe, 2016). Digital humanities first emerged in the late
1940s as “humanities computing,”when it formed the basis for such projects as the Index
Thomisticus conceived by an Italian priest named Father Roberto Busa. Today, digital
humanities are applying advanced computational tools to more diverse disciplines, ranging
from history and literature to cultural studies (Mone, 2016), and even computational
landscape. However, digital humanities must be understood in the context of the history, Journal of Documentation
Vol. 74 No. 1, 2018
pp. 223-246
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-05-2017-0076
Received 24 May 2017
Revised 14 August 2017
Accepted 17 September 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on
this study.
223
Digital
humanities
methodologies, and perceptions which its practitioners bring to the table
( Jennifer and Kevin, 2013). Grounded in the interactive values of humanities and
techniques, the digital humanities attempts to lead the humanities community into new
domain by promoting experimentation, collaboration, and openness (Spiro, 2012).
As an interdisciplinary movement, digital humanities is the result of a dynamic dialogue
between humanistic exploration and digital means. Digital technologies will keep coming,
although digital humanities has been growing rapidly around the world, it will remain
essential that uptake of technologies is a modern but necessary part of the humanities and
arts, and even as broad a sense as possible (Terras, 2016). At the same time, digital humanist
still need to push harder to get humanistic approaches and methods into the digital
humanities (Berdan, 2013).
Digital humanities is not limited to any one discipline or field, in the digital era it has
become a catch-all term for anyone who is engaging in the discovery, preservation,
and interpretation of humanities materials (documents, images, sound) to enable a better
and deeper understanding of current society. To some extent it is difficult to understand and
interpret what digital humanities actually is, but a core feature is that it encourages
researchers and practitioners to think about application probability of digital methods in
traditional humanities disciplines.
The rest of this study is organized as follows. A literature review is briefly described in
“Literature review”section. In “Methodology”section, the source of data, visualization
techniques, and parameter design are explained. Then, the results of the bibliometric
analysis are provided and interpreted in section “Results and discussion”. In subsection
“Yearly research output”and “Language of documents,”the distribution features of
publication and language are revealed through essential statistical analysis. Moreover,
this paper identifies the most active contributors (research strength) at the country,
institution, and author levels. The distribution of active journals is also illuminated simply.
In subsection “Network configuration of category,”disciplinary distribution can be detected.
In “Highly cited references”subsection, the co-cited references are analyzed so that the most
influential references and their distribution can be identified. In “Keywords co-occurrence
network”subsection, the results of co-keyword analysis are presented. The co-occurrence
network of keywords, providing link-based information on their relationship can be used to
determine hot research topics. The final section of this paper presents the conclusions and
discusses implication and limitations of this research work.
Literature review
Bibliometric analysis is not new. A quick search in the Web of Science (WoS) core collection
database using topic query “bibliometric analysis”resulted in more than 4,000 documents,
with nearly three-quarters of those being academic articles. Bibliometric analysis has been
adopted in various forms for more than a century (Pritchard and Wittig, 1981; Hood and
Wilson, 2001). Since Eugene Garfield founded the Information Sciences Institute in 1958 and
introduced the impact factor (IF), an increasing number of bibliometric indicators and tools
have been developed (Liu et al., 2015). Bibliometric analysis has been adopted in various
disciplines to visualize the patterns or intellectual structures of a scientific topic and to
assess the scientific outputs in a given field (Huang et al., 2016; Li et al., 2017).
Some studies use bibliometric tools to explore a specific field. For example,
J.A. Pratt et al. (2012) employed bibliometric analysis to define the intellectual structures
within information systems (IS) and between IS and other College of Business disciplines.
N. Sinkovics (2016) identified the clusters and the major themes of 410 articles connected to
ethics in marketing research with VOSviewer and NVivo. X. Wang et al. (2016) developed a
visualization of the research trends in energy policy studies over the past 50 years using the
bibliometric methods. H. Chen et al. (2017) discussed the state of the art of research on food
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