Gender influences in Digital Humanities co-authorship networks
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2021-0221 |
| Published date | 19 April 2022 |
| Date | 19 April 2022 |
| Pages | 327-350 |
| 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 |
| Author | Jin Gao,Julianne Nyhan,Oliver Duke-Williams,Simon Mahony |
Gender influences in
Digital Humanities
co-authorship networks
Jin Gao
Department of Information Studies, University College London, London, UK
Julianne Nyhan
Technische Universit€
at Darmstadt,
Chair of Humanities Data Science and Methodology, Institute of History, Darmstadt,
Germany and
Department of Information Studies, University College London, London, UK
Oliver Duke-Williams
Department of Information Studies, University College London, London, UK, and
Simon Mahony
Research Centre for Digital Publishing and Digital Humanities,
Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai, Zhuhai, China
Abstract
Purpose –This paper presentsa co-authorship study of authors who published in Digital Humanities journals
and examines the apparent influence of gender, or more specifically, the quantitatively detectable influence of
gender in the networks they form.
Design/methodology/approach –This study applied co-authorship network analysis. Data has been
collected from three canonical Digital Humanities journals over 52 years (1966–2017) and analysed.
Findings –The results are presented as visualised networks and suggest that female scholars in Digital
Humanities play more central roles and act as the main bridges of collaborative networks even though overall
female authors are fewer in number than male authors in the network.
Originality/value –This is the first co-authorship network study in Digital Humanities to examine the role
that gender appears to play in these co-authorship networks using statistical analysis and visualisation.
Keywords Digital Humanities, Co-authorship, Gender studies, Network analysis
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Researchers are known to benefit from diverse interpersonal and institutional connections
and networks, which have distinctive advantages for creating and sharing knowledge. For
example, it is known that co-authored publications often prove to be more highly cited than
single-author publications, and it is similarly known that there is a significant positive
correlation between the number of authors and the number of citations (Gazni and Didegah,
2011). Collaborations with more senior or highly cited colleagues are also known to have a
positive influence on the recruitment and progression of individual researchers and on
Influence of
gender in
Digital
Humanities
327
© Jin Gao, Julianne Nyhan, Oliver Duke-Williams and Simon Mahony. Published by Emerald Publishing
Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone
may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and
non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full
terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
This work was supported by the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, University College London and
The UCL Overseas Research Scholarships (UCL-ORS)
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 2 November 2021
Revised 17 March 2022
Accepted 17 March 2022
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 78 No. 7, 2022
pp. 327-350
Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-11-2021-0221
institutional rankings (Gorska et al., 2020, p. 273). Less well understood is the role that gender
might play in the formation and maintenance of such networks. What, then, can be concluded
about the role of gender in such networks from a quantitative analysis of co-authorship
networks? And what kinds of data sets and data-curation methods may advance this
research?
This paper explores these questions through the microcosm of Digital Humanities (DH),
an emerging field that is closely intertwined with Information Science (Bawden and
Robinson, 2012,p.7;Joo et al., 2021;Su and Zhang, 2021). Digital Humanities offers an
important case study on which to conduct this research because of its “small-world”
composition (Wang and Inaba, 2009;Grandjean, 2016;Tang et al., 2017), its demographic
formation (as a predominately white male-oriented community, Weingart and Eichmann-
Kalwara, 2017;Gao et al., 2018), and its geographical distribution of languages (forming an
Anglophone-oriented network as shown in studies by De la Cruz et al., 2015;Weingart and
Eichmann-Kalwara, 2017;Gao et al., 2018). Thus, the findings presented in this paper about
the nature of Digital Humanities can fruitfully be brought into conversation with quantitative
studies of fields with both similar and distinct compositions, opening the possibility that, in
due course, information science researchers will be able to answer the broad questions set out
above from the perspectives of a number of disciplines and from a global perspective.
Co-authorship links are formed when two or more scholars author a publication together.
These links can be modelled as a co-authorship network. The first statistical investigation of
co-authorship in DH was undertaken by (Nyhan and Duke-Williams, 2014a) based on a
smaller subset of the publication metadata analysed in this study [1]. To the best of our
knowledge, this paper presents the first co-authorship network study to combine
co-authorship patterns with gender in the study of DH communities. Co-authorship
networks have been used to investigate the structure of scientific collaborations in many
fields (Newman, 2001,2004;Smeatonet al.,2002)but, until this paper, not of the DH. This may
be because few DH journals are indexed in the repositories (e.g. Web of Science and Scopus)
that commonly provide publication data export for research analysis. The building of
bibliometric datasets from scratch is time- and labour-intensive because of the collecting,
cleaning,and coding that it entails. Yet, the practical difficultiesof deriving or making datasets
aside, DH communitiescertainly manifest many of the characteristics studiedin co-authorship
network analyses. Not only are DH communities interdisciplinary, the field itself is
increasingly fast-growingand outputs many co-authored publications (Savi
cet al.,2019).
Although age and academic position usually have a more significant impact on academic
production and communication, other variables, like gender, also play an important role
(Noordenbos, 1992;Aksnes et al., 2011). By enriching the Digital Humanities’co-authorship
network with gender information, this study takes a first step towards quantifying gender
and its longitudinal trend from 1966 to 2017 in ADHO (the Alliance of Digital Humanities
Organizations) and ACH (the Association for Computers and the Humanities) official DH
journals. It accordingly asks of those journals: what is the gender distribution of authors of
published papers? What patterns can be detected between academic productivity and gender
(when productivity is conceptualized as the number of papers published)? How do gender
differences affect DH interpersonal connections? How might this open new perspectives on
definitions of productivity that currently define this merely as number of publications
output?
This paper furthermore compiles and releases a dataset of ADHO and ACH DH journal
publication metadata, together with detailed methodological reflections on the nature of its
compilation to guide its use in further studies. From this dataset, this paper statistically
analyses and visualizes gender-disaggregated DH co-authorship, co-author clusters, and
publication-linked gender differences. In the narrative analysis of the network that follows,
JD
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