An Investigation on Digital Humanities Research Trend by Analyzing the Papers of Digital Humanities Conferences

Abstract

Digital humanities, which creates new and innovative knowledge through the combination of digital information technology and humanities research problems, can be seen as a representative multidisciplinary field of study. To investigate the intellectual structure of the digital humanities field, a network analysis of authors and keywords co-word was performed on a total of 441 papers in the last two years (2019, 2020) at the Digital Humanities Conference. As the results of the author and keyword analysis show, we can find out the active activities of Europe, North America, and Japanese and Chinese authors in East Asia. Through the co-author network, 11 dis-connected sub-networks are identified, which can be seen as a result of closed co-authoring activities. Through keyword analysis, 16 sub-subject areas are identified, which are machine learning, pedagogy, metadata, topic modeling, stylometry, cultural heritage, network, digital archive, natural language processing, digital library, twitter, drama, big data, neural network, virtual reality, and ethics. This results imply that a diver variety of digital information technologies are playing a major role in the digital humanities. In addition, keywords with high frequency can be classified into humanities-based keywords, digital information technology-based keywords, and convergence keywords. The dynamics of the growth and development of digital humanities can represented in these combinations of keywords.