Goals and scope
A working definition of Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities is a diverse and wide-ranging academic field and a community of practicioners that brings together digital, computational and/or statistical methods and tools with objects of study, research questions, theories and models relevant to the humanities, that investigates the methodological, theoretical and ethical aspects of this intersection, and that negotiates impulses regarding collaboration, dissemination, transdisciplinarity and openness between the involved fields. As such, Digital Humanities intersects with the Humanities and Social Sciences, with Computer Science and Statistics, as well as with Library and Information Science and the Open Science movement. While this certainly complicates the scoping issue, the transdisciplinary nature of the Digital Humanities is something we value and embrace.
A very brief outline of DH's institutionalization
The field emerged as early as the late 1940s, with pioneers practicing the application of computing technology to research questions in the humanities in a fragmented, marginal and slowly-growing field, soon under names like "computers and the humanities" or "humanities computing". This was followed by several waves of institutionalization at different levels, starting with associations, journals and centers and going all the way to professorships, study programs and, most recently, entire departments devoted to what, by the mid-2000s, would be called Digital Humanities.
But how exactly did this institutionalization develop in detail, for example with respect to geographical region and domain of the humanities? How are associations, conferences, journals and centers connected and how did they support each others' emergence? And of course, who were the people driving the field's institutionalization? How can the knowledge of the history of our field inform our decision-making for its future?
Primary goal: to document the institutional history of DH
Against the backdrop of such questions, the primary goal of Mapping Digital Humanities is to develop a resource that allows to collaboratively document and analyse the institutional history of the field of Digital Humanities. It aims to achive this goal, in particular, by documenting institutions (centers, associations, departments), publication venues (journals, book series) and conferences series devoted to Digital Humanities around the globe, both past and present. The scope of the endeavor also includes networks, initiatives, events, awards, training schools, textbooks and survey-style publications, book series, and study programmes. Last but not least, the scope includes the people that hold or have held leading roles in the various entities as well as the institutions they are of have been affiliated with. The scope excludes, however, certainly for the time being, individual projects, tools, conference contributions, or publications (other than those mentioned above).
Secondary goal: To serve as a hub for information about DH
A secondary goal of Mapping Digital Humanities is to serve as a hub to further information about the Digital Humanities as an academic field and as a community of practicioners. It does so by linking out not just to many individual websites, but also to a number of resources that have been used as sources of information for compiling Mapping Digital Humanities and that usually contain richer information about the entities described here. One the one hand, this includes general identity and authority providers such as Wikidata (for locations and institutions), ORCiD (for academics), RoR (for organizations) and OpenLibrary (for publications). One the other hand, this includes resources more specific to the Digital Humanities, such as the Index of Digital Humanities Conferences (for events, especially conferences), the Digital Humanities Course Registry (for study programmes) or the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography (for conference proceedings and journals).
What kinds of questions does Mapping DH aim to answer ?
It is customary in Ontology Design to circumscribe the scope and purpose of a Knowledge Base also in terms of the questions that it may help to answer. In that spirit, a number of questions are listed here, without any attempt to be exhaustive:
- Which decades since the 1950s have seen the most significant number of newly-founded associations devoted to some aspect of Digital Humanities?
- With respect to the scholarly journals relevant to Digital Humanities, when were they founded, what is their disciplinary scope, and what publication model do they practice?
- In which areas of the world can we observe that many centers, research groups or departments devoted to Digital Humanities exist today? What kind of entities are they, what is their disciplinary scope, what is the typical duration of their activity?
- Which study programmes devoted to Digital Humanities exist in a given country, what disciplinary scope do they have, at which universities are they being offered, what kind of degree do they allow students to obtain?
Note that while the data model attempts to cover the ground sketched by the research questions, it will only become possible to answer them once the breadth and diachronic depth of the data increases substantially.
