Guest editorial
| Pages | 154-161 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/DLP-08-2018-048 |
| Date | 13 August 2018 |
| Published date | 13 August 2018 |
| Author | Allan Cho,Megan Meredith-Lobay |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Records management & preservation,Information repositories |
Guest editorial
From humanities computing to the digital humanities: a literature review
Introduction
The theme “digital humanities”(DH) –its history, major projects and practitioners, and,
especially, its many definitions –has been the subject of frenzied scholarship and
publications for more than 20 years. However, many of the voices who have been most
active within the field over this time have come from the more “traditional”DH academic
fields such as English, Linguistics and History. In this special edition of Digital Library
Perspectives, the editors have lookedfor new voices within the DH ecosystem to expand our
understanding of where this work is taking place. We have achieved this through the
collection of papers by librarians,as well as academic researchers, and by scholars working
in non-Western contexts whose voices are so often leftout of mainstream DH’s discussions.
The papers collected in this issue present a vision of the Library as a central partnerin DH
scholarship; therefore,positioning the Library not just as a place to consume knowledgebut
as a place where new knowledge is actively co-createdby researchers and librarians alike.
The genealogy of DH as a field stretches back to late 1940s in the pioneering work of
Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa, who in collaboration with IBM created a computer-generated
concordance to Thomas Aquinas’writingsnow known as the Index Thomisticus, a tool for
performing text searches within the massive corpus of Aquinas’s works (Jones, 2016). As
other scholars began using mainframe computers to automate tasks like word searching,
sorting and counting, which was much faster than processing information from texts with
handwritten or typed index cards, academics and librarians in those institutions began
using a wide range of computational tools to enable humanities scholarship in integrating
and developing research at a scale once thought as impossible.“DH”as such emerged as a
term, as the practice allowed for collaboratingand blending disciplines and methodological
orientations together. Stanford University’s Humanities Center describes DH as a field that
encompasses a diverse array of initiatives that include “projects to digitize archival
materials for posterity, to map the exchange and transmission of ideas in history, and to
study the evolution of commonwords over the centuries”(Stanford University, 2018).
The formal institutionalization of DH has resulted in academic departments or units,
annual conferences, journals, educational programs and a rather strong sense of communal
identity, all qualities that are typicallyassociated with the establishment of a new discipline
(Svensson, 2016). In fact, DH conferences have occurred annually since 1989 which were
sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, and constituent
organizations of the Alliance have held conferences since 1973. A recent bibliometric
analysis by Qing Wangfound an obvious rapid growth in DH research, withthe UK and the
USA leading the way with research fields of theory and practice closely associated with
history, literary,cultural heritage and library and information science (Wang, 2018).
The evolution of DH has its organizational roots stretching back to earlier times when
they were referred more as “humanities computing”centers or units and were usually
affiliated with school of liberal artsor humanities. Such units provided service to the rest of
the school or faculty, and this simple, instrumental function has typically been primary.
Though there might have been development in many other directions over time, this basic
function cannot easily be dismissed. A prominent example would be the Humanities
Computing Unit at OxfordUniversity whose roots go back to 1960s (Burnard, 2002).
DLP
34,3
154
DigitalLibrary Perspectives
Vol.34 No. 3, 2018
pp. 154-161
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2059-5816
DOI 10.1108/DLP-08-2018-048
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