Investigating Digital Humanities: A Domain Analysis of Conference Proceedings Published in Taiwan, 2009-2016

Abstract

"The study reports on an analysis of a chosen corpus in the emergent domain of digital humanities (DH). In contrast to other studies of the DH literature that focus on publications in the west, this study examines 129 papers published in the proceedings of the International Conferences of Digital Archives and Digital Humanities that were held in Taiwan between 2009 and 2016. In all, 236 individual authors from 15 countries contributed at least one paper; 50 domains were represented. Three East Asian countries (Taiwan, China, and Japan) show a dominating presence, and top three domains (computer science, history, and Chinese) have the highest numbers of participants and highest numbers of first authors. Unlike their counterparts in the humanities, the papers in the study have a much higher percentage of collaborative works. More than half of the papers that are collaborative works are interdisciplinary, but only one-fifth involve international collaboration. Proportionally, computer scientists’ participation rate decreases and humanists’ rate increases, however modestly, from 2012 onward. The study also investigates digital technology’s impact on DH in various stages of the information lifecycle. More than two-thirds of the papers discuss technology’s impact in the area of consuming data from digital collections for various purposes, with the impact on building retrieval systems/online platforms coming in second at 26.6%. Among different years, the first year is exceptional in showing high interest in the impact on building digital collections, building knowledge organization systems, and building retrieval systems but low interest in the impact on data consumption. Humanists in general are more attentive to the impact on consumption than technologists, while the latter lean toward the impact on building retrieval systems. Without any claim to comprehensiveness or representativeness, the study provides a snapshot of the DH literary output."

Keywords

• domain analysis
• digital humanities
• international conference of digital archives and digital humanities (taipei taiwan)