digital humanities research topics

• Locations and Hours
• UCLA Library
• Research Guides

Digital Humanities

• Creating Digital Humanities Projects
• Finding Data

Digital Humanities Resources, Methods and Tools

General purpose data analysis tools and resources, digital humanities in practice.

• Managing Data
• UCLA Digital Humanities Support
• Digital Humanities Beyond UCLA
• Introductory Resources
• Text encoding and analysis
• Digital mapping
• Network analysis
• Digital preservation
• Data visualization
• Collaborative research
• Virtual reality and 3D modeling

Here are some general-purpose resources for developing digital humanities projects.

For resources and tools related to specific DH methodologies, please explore the other tabs in this box!

Best Practices for Digital Humanities Projects

• A brief guide from the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Development for the Digital Humanities

• A resource for developing and managing digital humanities projects. Includes sections on formulating research questions, defining projects, making a plan for data, and many other crucial features of a DH project.

Digital History

• This book provides a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium.

Digital Research Tools (DiRT)

• Archived version (2019) of the DiRT Directory is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use.

Introduction to Digital Humanities Course Book

• Adapted from DH 101 UCLA course

Programming Historian

• Peer-reviewed, hands-on workshop/tutorials

Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook

• A guide to the essential steps needed to plan a digital project. You can learn more about various project types, or look at case studies and assignments to see what others have done. You can also submit your own work for inclusion.

Text encoding and analysie involves using computational tools to analyze large amounts of text, such as books, articles and manuscripts, to uncover patterns and connections that would be difficult to find by reading them manually.

Tools and resources for text encoding and analysis:

• Provides guidelines for structuring texts for digital analysis with project example
• This freely available book provides a practical introduction to natural language processing (NLP) using the Python programming language, and it includes many examples of how NLP can be applied to textual data in the humanities 
• A web-based text-analysis tool  
• A tool that allows users to develop concordances, find keywords, and develop word lists from plain text files  
• Currently (2022), UCLA researchers have access to the free platform. Constellate allows you to build collections of content from multiple platforms (JStor, Portico, Chronicling America) as well as learn, teach, and perform text analysis ( Constellate tutorial list )  
•  a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data.
• Open source machine-learning toolkit. Topic models are useful for analyzing large collections of unlabeled text. The MALLET topic modeling toolkit contains efficient, sampling-based implementations of Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Pachinko Allocation, and Hierarchical LDA.
• Supports large-scale computational analysis of the works in the HathiTrust Digital Library to facilitate non-profit and educational research. Related: Programming Historian Python text mining tutorial for HathiTrust Research Center’s Extracted Features dataset

Digital mapping and spatial analysis involves creating digital maps and spatial analyses to study the relationships between people, places, and events in the past and present.

Tools and resources for digital mapping and spatial analysis:

• Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping software.
• Created by a global community of contributors, OpenStreetMap is a free, editable map of the world with an emphasis on local knowledge, existing as open data that can be used for research projects (or any other purpose) with proper credit

Network analysis and visualization involves using computational tools to analyze and visualize relationships between people, ideas, and events, in order to understand how they are connected and how they have changed over time.

Tools and resources for network analysis

• Free open source software for network analysis and visualization    
• An open source software platform for visualizing complex networks

Digital preservation and archiving involves creating digital copies of historical and cultural artifacts and making them available online, with the goal of preserving them for future generations.

Tools and resources for digital preservation:

• Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. To create maps and timelines, see Neatline , a suite of add-on tools.  
• Collection Builder is an open source tool for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that are driven by metadata and powered by modern static web technology
• Drupal is an open source content management system for supporting resources like blogs and web sites
• A cross-platform XML editor that may be used to create and validate XML documents and associated schema

Data visualization is the process of using graphical representations to show the results of data analysis, such as graphs, charts, and maps, which can help to identify patterns and trends. See the UCLA Data Visualization Research Guide for more information.

Collaborative research and annotation is the practice of multiple researchers working together using digital tools and platforms to annotate, analyze, and interpret data.

Tools and resources for collaborative research and annotation:

• Supports semantic markup/annotation, named-entity recognition, Geo-names   
• A semantic web authoring and publishing platform that supports various media annotations and multiple authors   
• Annotate the web with anyone, anywhere

Virtual reality (VR) and 3D modeling involves using virtual reality and 3D modeling techniques to create immersive simulations of historical and cultural sites, which can be used for research and education.

Tools and resources for VR and 3D modeling:

• Free open source 3D creation software that provides tools for modeling, animation, and simulation
• 3D modeling software with a simple, user-friendly interface for creating 3D models and scenes 
• A professional 3D animation software developed by Autodesk for more technically advanced users which provides a comprehensive set of tools for creating complex 3D models, animations, and simulations
• Introduction
• Other Resources

Here are some commonly used tools for data cleaning,  statistical analysis and visualization.

UCLA offers various  free and discounted licenses for some software products, so make sure to check the list before paying for a program.

Python is a programming language that enables data analysis.

• Download Python (free)
• Allows you to interactively write and execute Python in your browser with easy storage and sharing through Google Drive. It is a cloud-based version of Jupyter Notebook .
• Plotting and Programming in Python (Software Carpentries)
• The Python Tutorial (Python Documentation)
• Data Visualization with Python (GeeksforGeeks)
• Python Tutorial (W3Schools)
• Scikit-learn: Machine Learning Library

R is a programming language that enables data analysis.

• Download R (free)
• R Resources from UCLA OARC Stats Consulting
• Detailed Introduction to R
• R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis (Software Carpentries)
• R for Data Science

MATLAB is a proprietary programming language and numeric computing environment.

• How to Get Matlab (free for UCLA students, staff and faculty)
• Matlab Statistics & Machine Learning Toolbox
• Matlab Plotting (Tutorialspoint)
• Advanced Graphics and Visualization Techniques with MATLAB

Open Refine is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data.

• Download OpenRefine (free)
• OpenRefine Introduction
• OpenRefine Documentation and Support
• Lesson on OpenRefine (Library Carpentries)
• Cleaning Data with OpenRefine (The Programming Historian)
• Fetching and Parsing Data from the Web with OpenRefine (The Programming Historian)
• Using OpenRefine to Clean Your Data (Berkeley Advanced Media Institute)

Tableau Software helps people see and understand data. Tableau allows anyone to perform sophisticated education analytics and share their findings with online dashboards.

• Tableau Download (free for full-time UCLA students)
• Tableau Getting Started Overview
• Tableau Help Guide (Princeton)
• Get the Microsoft Office 365 Education Suite (free for UCLA students)
• Data Analysis with Excel
• Excel Data Analysis Overview (Tutorialspoint)

Stata is a proprietary, general-purpose statistical software package for data manipulation, visualization, statistics, and automated reporting. It is used by researchers in many fields, including biomedicine, economics, epidemiology and sociology.

• Order Stata (discounted for students and education)
• STATA Resources from UCLA OARC Stats Consulting
• Stata User Guide
• Stata Coding Guide
• Online Stata Tutorial
• Getting Started in Data Analysis using Stata

SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is a software package used for the analysis of statistical data. Although the name of SPSS reflects its original use in the field of social sciences, its use has since expanded into other data markets.

• How to Get SPSS at UCLA
• SPSS Resources from UCLA OARC Stats Consulting
• SPSS Beginner Tutorial

ArcGIS is geospatial software to view, edit, manage and analyze geographic data. It enables users to visualize spacial data and create maps.

• ArcGIS Product Overview
• UCLA Guide: GIS & Geospatial Technologies
• UCLA Software Central: ArcGIS Overview

Stackoverflow

• A community where people can ask, answer, and search for questions related to programming

Software Carpentries

• Lessons to build software skills, part of the larger community The Carpentries which aims to teach foundational computational and data science skills to researchers
• Cloud-based service website based on Git software that allows develops to store and manage their code, especially helpful for version control during collaboration. The Software Carpentries has a lesson on Git and Github where you can learn more

Open Data Tools

• List of tools and resources to explore, publish, and share public datasets with sections specifically for visualization, data, source code, and information.

Data Science Notebooks

• List of interactive computing platforms for data science, includes comparison table at the bottom of the page
• Open graph visualization platform, well-known as a tool for network visualization
• Digital Humanities Projects
• Digital Humanities Journals

DH Projects at UCLA:

• UCLA Library Digital Collections This link opens in a new window Rare and unique digital materials developed by the UCLA Library to support education, research, service, and creative expression, including the AIDS Poster Collection, the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive and more.
• AEGARON: Ancient Egyptian Architecture Online Provides vetted and standardized architectural drawings of a selection of ancient Egyptian buildings.
• Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
• Digital Karnak Archived version of this resource.
• Hypercities
• UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology

Other DH Projects:

• Ancient World Mapping Center The Ancient World Mapping center hosts maps, articles, images of artifacts, and bibliographies of the ancient world. Tools used on this project are: XML, TEI, CSS2, JAWS for Windows.
• The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Rossetti Archive features materials by and about the nineteenth-cenury Victorian painter, designer, writer and translator, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Among the resources on this website are books, manuscripts, correspondence, pictures, and poems. The tools used are: Collex, XML.
• Digital Black History A free, searchable directory for online history projects that can help further Black History research. This ongoing project was created to collect information about these digital Black History projects in order to benefit historians, genealogists, and family historians who are researching the lives of Black individuals and families.
• Documenting the American South This project is a digital puclishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to Southern history, literature, and culture.
• East London Theater Archive The East London Theatre Archive provides online access to resources of music hall and variety theatres in London's East End during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The tools used in this project are: Fedora Commons, Javascript, MySQL, and PHP.
• Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker Links to freely-available digital facsimiles of eighteenth-century texts available at sites like Google Books and the Internet Archive.
• Mark Twain Project The mark Twain Project offers access to a variety of Mark Twain's writings, including texts, exhaustive notes, recently discovered letters, and documents relating to the author. Tools used in this project are: XML, STF, TEI, METS, MADS, MODS, DTD
• The Monastic Wales Project The Monastic Wales project fetures primary sources, secondary literature, maps, bibliographies, and articles on the monastic history of Medieval Wales. The tools used on this project are: MySQL, PHP.
• Valley of the Shadow The Valley of the Shadow provides details about the lives of two communities, one Northern and the other Southern, during the Civil War. Included are original diaries, letters, newspapers, speeches, census and church records. Tools used: Apache Lucene, Apache Solr, Cocoon.
• The Walt Whitman Archive Research and teaching tool for the study of Walt Whitman, containing material from libraries and collections all over the world.
• The William Blake Archive "The Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility."
• The World of Dante A multi-media research tool intended to facilitate the study of the Divine Comedy through a wide range of offerings, e.g. an encoded Italian text which allows for structured searches and analyses, an English translation, interactive maps, diagrams, music, a database, timeline and gallery of illustrations.

Electronic Journals:

• The Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods. DHQ seeks to provide a forum where practitioners, theorists, researchers, and teachers in this field can share their work with each other and with those from related disciplines.
• Digital Humanities Quarterly The mission of the DHQ includes experimenting with publication formats and the rhetoric of digital authoring, collaborating with ADHO's flagship print journal, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, in order to bridge the print-divide, using open standards in delivering journal content, facilitating international participation while developing translation services allowing multilingual review.
• Digital Studies / Le Champ Numerique Published three times a year, this peer-reviewed multilingual and interdisciplinary journal focuses on emerging digital humanities methodology and its application. This journal is also licensed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 license.
• Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular This semi-annual journal utilizes emergent and transitionsl media to publish works on social, political and cultural issues.
• First Monday Ths peer-reviewed online journal publishes articles on the subject of the Internet and information technology. With articles on the subjects of digital libraries, digitization, metadata, and the humanities in the digital age, First Monday proves to be a valuable resource in the study of the Digital Humanities.
• Journal of Digital Humanities The Journal of Digital Humanities is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter.
• Journal of Cultural Analytics
• Journal of Open Humanities Data Great resource for published data-sets
• Reviews in DH is the pilot of a peer-reviewed journal and project registry that facilitates scholarly evaluation and dissemination of digital humanities work and its outputs

Subject Specific:

• Digital Medievalist This online peer-reviewed journal publishes articles on technological topics that relate to humanities computing and digital media relevant to the study of medieval history.
• 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth 19 is an open-access, scholarly, refereed web journal dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary study in the long nineteenth century. 19 publishes two themed issues annually, each consisting of a collection of peer-reviewed articles showcasing the broadest range of new research in nineteenth-century studies, as well as special forums advancing critical debate in the field.
• Contemporary Aesthetics In recent years aesthetics has grown into a rich and varied discipline. Its scope has widened to embrace ethical, social, religious, environmental, and cultural concerns. As international communication increases through more frequent congresses and electronic communication, varied traditions have joined with its historically interdisciplinary character, making aesthetics a focal center of diverse and multiple interests.

Non-Peer Reviewed:

• Journal of Electronic Publishing Published by the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan University Library, this journal focuses on the methods and means of contemporary publishing and digital communication.
• Text Technology: The Journal of Computer Text Processing The online journal of the Society for thei Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs dedicated to sypplying articles relating to the use of computers in analysis and creation of texts. Article topics include professional and academic writing and research, analysis of texts, electronic publishing, software and book reviews, and issues relating to the internet.
• Digital Humanities Now Digital Humanities Now showcases the scholarship and news of interest to the digital humanities community through a process of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review .Digital Humanities Now also is an experiment in ways to identify, evaluate, and distribute scholarship on the open web through a weekly publication and the quarterly Journal of Digital Humanities.
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• Last Updated: Oct 28, 2024 1:56 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.ucla.edu/digital-humanities

• Digital Humanities
• Getting Started
• Digital Scholarship Services
• Mapping and Timelines
• Storytelling
• Text Analysis
• Visualization
• Static Sites & Minimal Computing
• Communities

Search Words for Researching Digital Humanities

You may also wish to conduct research in databases specific to your discipline.

Try these recommended search terms in general databases:

• Computational Humanities
• Computational Linguistics
• Computational Text Analysis
• Computerization
• Critical Editing
• Digital Collections
• Digital History
• Digital Image Processing
• Digital Library
• Digital Media
• Digital Resources
• Digitization
• E-Humanities
• Electronic Scholarship
• Electronic Text
• Hermeneutic Informatics
• Humanities Computing
• Image-Based Computing
• Literary Data Processing
• Quantitative methods
• Text Encoding
• Textual Analysis
• Textual Informatics
• Virtual Library

Journals & Databases

From Kairos (1996-) and Digital Humanities Quarterly (2007-), to newer launches like Reviews in Digital Humanities (2020-), DH journals facilitate conversations in the field.

The following list includes top journals as well as several field-specific publications:

• 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long 19th Century 19 is an open-access, scholarly, refereed web journal dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary study in the long 19 publishes two themed issues annually, each consisting of a collection of peer-reviewed articles showcasing the broadest range of new research in nineteenth-century studies, as well as special forums advancing critical debate in the field.
• Digital Humanities Quarterly An open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities. Published by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).
• Digital Medievalist This online peer-reviewed journal publishes articles on technological topics that relate to humanities computing and digital media relevant to the study of medieval history.
• Digital Studies Refereed academic journal serving as a formal arena for scholarly activity and as an academic resource for researchers in the digital humanities.
• First Monday This peer-reviewed online journal publishes articles on the subject of the Internet and information technology. With articles on the subjects of digital libraries, digitization, metadata, and the humanities in the digital age, First Monday proves to be a valuable resource in the study of the Digital Humanities.
• Game Studies Game Studies explores the rich cultural genre of games in the effort to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories and provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming.
• Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication A broadly interdisciplinary web-based peer review journal. Its focus is social science research on computer-mediated communication via the internet, the World Wide Web, and wireless technologies. Full Text online 1995-Present.
• Journal of Computer Assisted Learning Covers the whole range of uses of information and communication technology to support learning and knowledge exchange.
• Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Open access, openly peer reviewed journal to "promote open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research."
• Kairos Kairos is a refereed open-access online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. First published in 1996, Kairos is the longest continuously-publishing online peer-reviewed journals in the field of digital rhetoric.
• Literary & Linguistic Computing Covers all aspects of computing and information technology applied to literature and language research and teaching.
• Reviews in Digital Humanities Edited by Dr. Jennifer Guiliano and Dr. Roopika Risam, this peer-reviewed journal and project registry facilitates scholarly evaluation and dissemination of digital humanities work and its outputs.

Zotero: Open DH Bibliographies

• Doing Digital Humanities
• Digital Humanities Group Listings Open collections of articles on many topics in the DH field.
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• Last Updated: Oct 10, 2024 2:21 PM
• URL: https://guides.nyu.edu/digital-humanities

Digital Humanities in Practice: From Research Questions to Results

Use data science to enhance your research.

Combine literary research with data science to find answers in unexpected ways. Learn basic coding tools to draw insights from thousands of documents at once.

What You'll Learn

From the printing press to the typewriter, there is a long history of scholars adapting to new technologies. In the last forty or fifty years, the most significant advance has been the digitization of books. We now have whole libraries—centuries of history, literature, and philosophy—available instantaneously. This new access is a wonderful benefit, but it can also be overwhelming. If you have hundreds of thousands of books available to you in an instant, where do you even start? With a bit of elementary code, you can study all of these books at once, and derive new sorts of insights.

Computation is changing the very nature of how we do research in the humanities. Tools from data science can help you to explore the record of human culture in ways that just wouldn’t have been possible before. You’re more likely to reach out to others, to work across disciplines, and to assemble teams. Whether you're a student wanting to expand your skillset, a librarian supporting new modes of research, or a journalist who has just received a massive cache of leaked e-mails, this course will show you how to draw insights from thousands of documents at once. You will learn how, with a few simple lines of code, to make use of the metadata—the information about our objects of study—to zero in on what matters most, and visualize your results so that you can understand them at a glance.

In this course, you’ll work on building parts of a search engine, one tailor-made to the needs of academic research. Along the way, you'll learn the fundamentals of text analysis: a set of techniques for manipulating the written word that stand at the core of the digital humanities.

By the end of the course, you will be able to apply what you learn to what interests you most, be it contemporary speeches, journalism, caselaw, and even art objects. This course will analyze pieces of 18th-century literature, showing you how these methods can be applied to philosophical works, religious texts, political and historical records – material from across the spectrum of humanistic inquiry.

Combine your traditional research skills with data science to find answers you never might have expected.

The course will be delivered via edX and connect learners around the world. By the end of the course, participants will:

• Understand which digital methods are most suitable to meaningfully analyze large databases of text
• Identify the resources needed to complete complex digital projects and learn about their possible limitations
• Download existing datasets and create new ones by scraping websites and using APIs
• Enrich metadata and tag text to optimize the results of your analysis
• Analyze thousands of books with digital methods such as topic modeling, vector models, and concept search
• Test your knowledge by writing and editing code in Python, and use these skills to explore new methods of search

Your Instructors

Stephen Osadetz

Faculty Director of "The Digital Humanities in Practice" and Associate of the Department of English at Harvard University Read full bio.

Cole Crawford

Software Engineer, Humanities Research Computing  at Harvard University Read full bio.

Christine Fernsebner Eslao

Metadata Technologies Program Manager for Harvard Library Information & Technical Services at Harvard University Read full bio.  

Ways to take this course

When you enroll in this course, you will have the option of pursuing a Verified Certificate or Auditing the Course.

A Verified Certificate costs $219 and provides unlimited access to full course materials, activities, tests, and forums. At the end of the course, learners who earn a passing grade can receive a certificate. 

Alternatively, learners can Audit the course for free and have access to select course material, activities, tests, and forums.  Please note that this track does not offer a certificate for learners who earn a passing grade.

Related Courses

Data science principles.

Data Science Principles gives you an overview of data science with a code- and math-free introduction to prediction, causality, data wrangling, privacy, and ethics.

Shakespeare's Life and Work

Moving between the world in which Shakespeare lived and the present day, this course will introduce different kinds of literary analysis that you can use when reading Shakespeare.

Religious Literacy: Traditions and Scriptures

Led by Harvard faculty, this course will help you learn to better understand the complex ways that religions function in historic and contemporary contexts.

• Getting Started
• Choosing Digital Methods and Tools
• Learning Digital Methods
• Data and Digital Materials
• DH/DS Communities
• Funding and Grants

Digital Scholarship Publications and Conferences

• DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (formerly Literary & Linguistic Computing ) is an international, peer-reviewed journal (Oxford University Press, on behalf of  EADH and ADHO ) which publishes original contributions on all aspects of digital scholarship in the Humanities including, but not limited to, the field of what is currently called the Digital Humanities. Long and short papers report on theoretical, methodological, experimental, and applied research and include results of research projects, descriptions and evaluations of tools, techniques, and methodologies, and reports on work in progress.
• DHQ (Digital Humanities Quarterly)   is an open-access peer-reviewed journal from The Association for Computers and the Humanities . Launched in 2007, DHQ publishes articles, reviews, case studies, and opinion pieces on all aspects of digital humanities, as well as guest-edited thematic and language-specific special issues.
• Digital Studies / Le champ numérique is a refereed academic journal that serves as an Open Access area for formal scholarly activity and as a resource for researchers in the Digital Humanities. DS/CN articles focus on the intersection of technology and humanities research, including on the application of technology to cultural, historical, and social problems, on the societal and institutional context of such applications, and the history and development of the field of Digital Humanities.

– Digital cultural heritage with a special focus on born digital documents / archives – Data visualization, information retrieval, statistical analysis, big data – Natural language processing, named entity recognition, topic modelling, text mining – Digital scholarly editing – Semantic web technology, network theory – 3D modelling, digital visualization – Teaching Digital Humanities

• Cultural Analytics is an open-access journal dedicated to the computational study of culture. Its aim is to promote high quality scholarship that applies computational and quantitative methods to the study of cultural objects (sound, image, text), cultural processes (reading, listening, searching, sorting, hierarchizing) and cultural agents (artists, editors, producers, composers). Articles combine theoretical sophistication, computational expertise, and grounding in a particular field towards the crafting of thought-provoking arguments about how culture works at significantly larger scales than traditional research.  Cultural Analytics  publishes in three sections: Articles, Data Sets, and Debates.
• Kairos is a refereed open-access online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. Since its first issue in January of 1996, the mission of Kairos has been to publish scholarship that examines digital and multimodal composing practices, promoting work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media.  Kairos publishes “webtexts,” which are texts authored specifically for web publication.
• Computational Linguistics   is the longest-running publication devoted exclusively to the computational and mathematical properties of language and the design and analysis of natural language processing systems. This highly regarded quarterly offers university and industry linguists, computational linguists, artificial intelligence and machine learning investigators, cognitive scientists, speech specialists, and philosophers the latest information about the computational aspects of all the facets of research on language.
• Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative ,  the official journal of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium , publishes selected papers from the annual TEI Conference and Members’ Meeting and special issues based on topics or themes of interest to the community or in conjunction with special events or meetings associated with TEI.
• The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy (JITP) promotes open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research. “Educational institutions have often embraced instrumentalist conceptions and market-driven implementations of technology that overdetermine its uses in academic environments. Such approaches underestimate the need for critical engagement with the integration of technological tools into pedagogical practice. The JITP will endeavor to counter these trends by recentering questions of pedagogy in our discussions of technology in higher education. The journal will also work to change what counts as scholarship—and how it is presented, disseminated, and reviewed—by allowing contributors to develop their ideas, publish their work, and engage their readers using multiple formats.”
• Humanist Studies & the Digital Age   is devoted to the study and reformulation of received philological and philosophical ideas of writing and reading in the Digital Era. It is part of the Directory of Open Access Journals.
• The  International Journal for Digital Art History   seeks to gather current developments in the field of Digital Art History world-wide and to foster discourse on the subject both from Art History and Information Science.
• The Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities is concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities, with tools provided by computing such as data visualization, information retrieval, statistics, text mining by publishing scholarly work beyond the traditional humanities.

Defunct / Inactive

• The Journal of Digital Humanities has been on hiatus since 2014. It was a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features scholarship, tools, and conversations produced, identified, and tracked by members of the digital humanities community through Digital Humanities Now .
• Frontiers in Digital Humanities   is now closed for submission. Its goal was to publish rigorously peer-reviewed research from Digital History to Big Data, providing a community platform for the Humanities in the digital age.
• Computers in the Humanities Working Papers were “an interdisciplinary series of refereed publications on computer-assisted research” (1990s-2009).
• Vectors   last published in 2013. Operating at the intersection of culture, creativity, and technology, the journal focused on the myriad ways technology shapes, transforms, reconfigures, and/or impedes social relations, both in the past and in the present. Utilizing a peer-reviewed format and under the guidance of an international board,  Vectors featured submissions and specially-commissioned works comprised of moving- and still-images; voice, music, and sound; computational and interactive structures; social software; and more – works that need to exist in multimedia.
• Digital Literary Studies last published in 2016. It published scholarly articles on research concerned with computational approaches to literary analysis/criticism, or critical/literary approaches to electronic literature, digital media, and textual resources.

Conferences

• Digital Humanities is the annual ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations) conference and the largest event in the field. It is typically held between late June and early August, and rotates each year between North America, Europe, and the rest of the world. DH 2022 will be held in Tokyo, Japan, and DH 2023 will be held in Graz, Austria.
• The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) holds a biannual conference in the US.
• IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) typically holds a late fall working meeting and a spring / summer conference each year . The 2020 conference was scheduled to be hosted by Harvard in Boston, but has been postponed. The 2021 conference is free and online and will take place from June 22-24.
• HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) is an interdisciplinary community of humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and technologists changing the way we teach and learn. The annual HASTAC conference is hosted by affiliate locations around the globe. The Spring 2022 HASTAC Conference will be hosted by the Pratt Institute in NYC.

Book Series

• Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press) is a hybrid print/digital book series that explores debates in the field as they emerge. With biannual volumes that highlight current issues in the field, and special volumes on topics of pressing interest,  Debates in the Digital Humanities  tracks the field as it continues to grow.
• Digital Culture Books: Digital Humanities (University of Michigan Press) features rigorous research that advances understanding of the nature and implications of the changing relationship between humanities and digital technologies. Books, monographs, and experimental formats that define current practices, emergent trends, and future directions are accepted.
• Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities (Routledge) covers a wide range of disciplines and provides an authoritative reflection of the ‘state of the art’ in the application of computing and technology. The titles in this peer-reviewed series are critical reading not just for experts in digital humanities and technology issues, but for all scholars working in arts and humanities who need to understand the issues around digital research.
• Topics in the Digital Humanities (University of Illinois Press)
• Digital Humanities: Knowledge, Thought and Practice (OpenBook Publishers) presents cutting-edge research that investigate the links between the digital and other disciplines paving the ways for further investigations and applications that take advantage of new digital media to present knowledge in new ways.

Twitter and Blogs

Blogs and Twitter are usually the fastest way to hear the latest DH research, as well as all the news that doesn’t make it into a refereed publication.

Twitter Lists

• In progress:  DH Organizations, Centers, and Publications
• In progress:  DH People
• Ben Schmidt
• Found History (Tom Scheinfeldt)
• The Scottbott Irregular (Scott Weingart)
• Sample Reality (Mark Sample)
• Miriam Posner

• Frontiers in Computer Science
• Human-Media Interaction
• Research Topics

Artificial Intelligence: The New Frontier in Digital Humanities

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• Published: 02 January 2024

Making and interpreting: digital humanities as embodied action

• Zhiqing Zhang 1 ,
• Wanyi Song 2 &
• Peng Liu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5087-2112 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  13 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Digital technology has created new spaces, new realities and new ways of life, which have changed the way people perceive and recognise the world. In particular, the production, dissemination and reception methods of literature and art have been impacted upon significantly. Acknowledging humanities scholars have been engaged in conducting research while theorising and debating what Digital Humanities (DH) is/is not in the past two decades, this study extends current thought on DH by connecting it with the concept of sociological body, particularly thinking bodily interaction in relation to digital technologies in DH practice. The increasingly deepening integration of body and technology allows DH practice to become an event, in which embodied bodily action is situated in the (digital) environment that impacts on knowledge production. Acknowledging contemporary discourse regarding the two waves of DH, the article pays attention to the presence of the body whereby DH practice is bodily inclusive as mediated by digital technology, in which bodily interaction in producing knowledge via technologies reflects haptic experience and cultural constraints upon the sociological body. At the same time, technologies are not an innocent medium but an active contributor, so much so that we claim knowledge produced with the substantial involvement of digital technology is ‘digitised’ knowledge, as our critical interpretation towards a possible DH 3.0 practice that is subject to the core value of the humanities.

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Introduction.

Embracing the current academic tide that favours interdisciplinary research as a means to break boundaries and achieve the integration of disciplines, Harpham ( 2006 ), the former director of the National Humanities Center in U.S., notes that questions formerly reserved for the humanities are being approached by scientists in various disciplines, such as cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, artificial life, and behavioural genetics. Acknowledging digital technologies have energised humanities research, the emerging field of Digital Humanities (DH) is a response to the transformation of humanities in the digital age. It is worthwhile reminding ourselves that the essential problem of humanity in a computerised age remains the same as it has always been; that is, the problem of not solely how to be more productive, more comfortable, more content, but also how to be more sensitive, more proportionate, more alive (Cousins, 1966 ). DH has interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary attributes since its inception, Footnote 1 even though the very definition of DH is still being debated. This article draws on the concept of the sociological body in interdisciplinary terms by thinking bodily embodiment and haptic experience in relation to DH practice whereby the increasing integration of body and technology allows DH to be seen as an event; that is to say, as an embodied body in a digitally situated environment forming information and producing knowledge.

Digital Humanities, initially called Humanities Computing, is broadly humanities-based field involving scholars in the research areas of literary studies, history, media studies, musicology, and many other fields which benefitted from bringing computing technologies into the study of humanities materials. DH originated in the pursuit of more accurate objectivity and comprehensiveness in research beyond traditional methods in the humanities, such as McGann’s ( 2013 ) study on library research on how digital technologies can provide easier access to primary materials and increase the speed of searching and comparison. In cultural analytics, research can be conducted through the use of quantitative computational techniques which offer massive amounts of literary or visual data analysis (Manovich and Douglas, 2009 ), allowing for the visualisation of large amounts of data where patterns emerge. Acknowledging humanistic scholarship is either in the traditionalist mode of individual sensibility or in the contemporary mode of social critique, DH articulates a different understanding of the nature of meaning, which is “to speak to the larger patterns and deeper meanings of human experience…[and is] a modern technological incarnation” (Fuller, 2020 , 260, 262). The well-known example is the difference between distant readings versus close readings of texts in literary study (Moretti, 2013 ).

DH scholars are those who either adopt digital technologies in studying questions that are traditional to the humanities, or use values of traditional humanities in questioning digital technologies. Nevertheless, humanities research is increasingly being mediated through digital technology. Acknowledging efforts to theorise DH as a new discipline in which the debate on the boundary of DH is continuing and has not been settled over the past two decades, DH is intimate to humanities research, given the increasing number of research done in/via ‘charticles’, or journalistic articles that combine text, image, video, computational applications and interactivity in the humanities (Stickney, 2008 ). Kirschenbaum ( 2012 ) notes that various DH scholarly approaches reflect their interest in making in DH by, for example, creating digital archives, digital visualisation and possible new digital methods for (re)exploring social and cultural concerns. McGann notes that the main value of DH work resides in the creation, migration, or preservation of cultural materials ( 2008 , 2014 ). Meanwhile, other scholars emphasise interpretive work as a critical reflection, such as the interpretation of DH production in terms of its social and cultural impact. Although the digital approach can lead to a different understanding of large-scale cultural, social and political processes, it is actualised in concrete actions and reactions of operating digital technologies reflected as decision making on, and interpretation of, the inclusion/exclusion of data, for example. Thinking bodily interactions, humanities and digital technology altogether is to focus on the making in practice with the presence of body and haptic knowledge. In other words, technologies are not innocent; the knowledge produced with the substantial involvement of digital technology is ‘digitised’ knowledge, thereafter the bodily digital is formed.

While Manovich questions what culture is after it has been “softwarized” ( 2009 ), this article acknowledges, following Berry, that “understanding digital humanities is in some sense then understanding code, and this can be a resourceful way of understanding cultural production more generally” (2011, 5). In other words, the computer together with software is “the new engine of culture” (Manovich, 2013 , 21) and DH is where it takes effect. The article uses an interdisciplinary approach to think through the everyday use of digital technology in professional practice and research activity as an embodied act, in which one’s bodily action can be the critical interpretation in the process of knowledge making, such as bodily movement in manipulating digital technologies. Bodily making is critical interpretation. The mingling between physical and virtual space is ever strong, enabled and accelerated by the development of technology, such as immersive bodily experience by TeamLab. There is no longer a need to divide actual and virtual spaces, but rather take the body in action that is acting, reacting and crossing spaces constantly while knowledge is produced, in which ‘digitised’ embodiment and the bodily digital are formed. Rethinking DH via the concepts of situatedness and embodied bodily actions is to think DH practice as dynamic event, being in the world and beyond a discipline.

This article argues that DH practice is an embodied act in experiencing the impact of digital technology upon bodies, whereby new bodily knowledge, inclusive of the haptic and the visual, emerges in the process of action and reaction in collaboration with digital tools across actual and virtual space. The article, via analytical discussion, conceptualises and sees digital technology as not an innocent tool or neutral medium, but rather a series of concrete actions and reactions of bodily interactions with actuality and virtuality, where the knowledge co-produced is ‘digitised’ knowledge. The article, therefore, begins with a literature review that revisits the core value of traditional humanities, followed by stating the changes brought about by virtual reality, and then presents various concerns and some conceptual analysis of distinct and diverse aspects of scholarly works in the two waves of DH. The research method descripts the ensuing analytical discussion built on from previous works in terms of the concepts of situatedness and embodiment as a theoretical lens. The findings are elaborated on and theorised in the penultimate section conceptualising the bodily inclusive in DH practice by thinking bodily interaction, humanities, and digital technology altogether to produce ‘digitised’ knowledge via two case analyses.

Literature review

Criticalness–core value of humanities.

Criticalness, along with debate, pluralism and inquiry for instance, is the essence of the humanities, and the role of humanities scholars is crucial in the production and interpretation of cultural materials. There is a need to identify the values in DH which Spiro proposes are openness, collaboration, experimentation, collegiality and connectedness, and diversity and experimentation (2012a; 2012b). How the values of DH can be harnessed to enhance the humanities can be thought through in various ways; however, what is relevant to this article is in terms of bodily actions. Despite decades-long debate on DH’s role, value and relation to the humanities, much humanities research relies too much on digital technologies while critical awareness has weakened. For example, text can be quantified by forming conceptual indicators, yet the meaning temporarily fixed by researchers has limited explanatory power, thus highlighting the lack of criticism. Footnote 2 The humanistic pursuit of knowledge, which concerns subjective consciousness and is related to the viewer’s sensibility, cannot be processed by numbers themselves. In other words, in the current context of academic research ‘to have numbers’, scholars are concerned that art and literature works, for example, may only have data value after electronic transformation (Zhang and Zhang, 2021).

Becoming virtual

American scholar Lippmann proposed a concept in 1922 called “pseudo-environment” in his far-reaching book Public Opinion . Lippmann believes that newspapers, magazines and other media reconstruct a reality, which he calls a pseudo-environment. This pseudo-environment is an information environment, not an objective response to the real environment, but a new world created by the media, which shapes the audience’s picture of the real world in their minds (Lippmann, 1922 ). The original meaning of pseudo in English contains the meaning of ‘false’. Lippmann believes that the reality created by the media is not the reality that is faithfully reflected, but the reality constructed by the media organisation and the media organisation system; as long as the audience believes it, they exist in it. With the change of the media environment, the pseudo-environment, constructed by centralised media, such as newspapers and magazines, is a thing of the past. Instead, it has been replaced by the virtual environment based on the Internet. The virtual space is visual, distributed, and interactive involving user participation. While the pseudo-environment includes the participation of media organisations and ‘false’ elements in it, there is no such question of authenticity in the virtual space; or in other words, the liquid and User-Generated Content (UGC)-based new reality redefine the question of what is true and what is false.

The pseudo-environment has been replaced by virtual reality. For example, American science fiction writer Neal Stephenson published a novel Snow Crash in 1992 in which he created a space that did not exist—Metaverse. The Internet era is a digital era, and the virtual era is a dynamic and image era composed of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR). The visual space created by virtual reality does not exist in one’s imagination, nor is it completely real, but offers a kind of new bodily experience and existence independent of matter and consciousness. Therefore, the advent of this virtual era ensured and advanced by digital technologies has affected not only people’s lifestyles, such as shopping and travelling, but the way people perceive and recognise the world through bodily experience.

Digital humanities

Digital Humanities (DH) research stems from the pursuit of objectivity and comprehensiveness in the research of the humanities (Piper, 2016 ). Based on a large amount of data, it attempts to conduct quantitative analysis on the subjectivity of the humanities and obtain some factual conclusions on this basis. Digital technologies have furthered this type of research and redefined DH as a response to the transformation of the humanities in the digital age. It is generally believed that DH is a field of academic activities where computer or digital technology intersects with the humanities. The pioneer of digital humanities recognised by academic circles is Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit priest. According to Jones ( 2016 ), Busa in collaboration with IBM in 1949 made an index consisting of more than 10 million words from the Latin works of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). This epoch-making achievement combined text and calculation for the first time, which greatly promoted the application of computers in the field of linguistics. In the 1960s, statistics began to join in, the most representative of which was the new research field of ‘authorship research’, which classified author texts by counting the frequency of word occurrence or the number of word occurrences, because each author is usually considered to have unique—yet very subtle—stylistic differences in the use of common words. A typical example of this is the study of the authorship of The Federalist Papers (1787–1788). Footnote 3 The first academic journal in DH, entitled Computers and the Humanities , was launched in 1966.

William Pannapacker declared the arrival of digital humanities at the annual meeting of Modern Languages Association (MLA) conference in 2009, which is the largest and most important association in the field of humanities in the United States. Many discussions have revolved around DH ever since, focussing on three core features. Firstly, DH digitises vast experiential materials and establishes (or utilises existing) databases to lay the foundation for analysis; secondly, it introduces statistical methods, conducts data mining, compares the significant characteristics of quantitative indicators, or discovers certain patterns, trends and regular phenomena; and thirdly, there is diversification and dynamic presentation of the research results.

The first wave

There are two widely known waves in DH. The first wave took place in the late 1990s focussing on digitisation projects. Moretti ( 2000 ) believes that to study world literature, neither ‘close reading’ nor comparative methods should be used, but a new ‘distant reading’ mode should be used, that is, using databases and quantitative methods, to explain the category factors and formal elements in the overall or broader text system. For example, by using a case study on published novels, Moretti exemplifies that the excessive number of novels cannot be understood by traditional methods in the humanities, but rather it is “a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole” (2005/2007, 3–4). The impact of the first wave included data mining or large corpus processing and distant reading, which brought new insights and techniques into the humanities, as distinct from traditional methods such as close reading and textual analysis. The first wave was later summarised by Schnapp and Presner as “quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays” (2009, 2). Previous discussions regarding the first wave resulted in many binary points of views, such as close reading versus distance reading, ‘panoramic’ collective view enabled by digital technology and big data versus individual intimate experience in traditional humanities, actual versus virtual, etc. Discussion regarding the binarism of digital technologies in humanities research seems to be diminishing with the arrival of the second wave of DH.

The second wave

The second wave called Digital Humanities 2.0 arrived in the late 2000s with more complexity and wider application in practice and theory; it “is deeply generative, creating the environments and tools for producing, curating, and interacting with knowledge that is ‘born digital’ and lives in various digital contexts…[and] introduces entirely new disciplinary paradigms, convergent fields, hybrid methodologies…” (Presner, 2010 , 68). Hayles notes that DH had emerged from “the low-prestige status of a support service into a genuinely intellectual endeavour with its own professional practices, rigorous standards, and exciting theoretical explorations” (2011, 46). Many scholars had recognised by then that DH is a new way of working with representation and mediation, such as Schreibman et al. ( 2008 ), Schnapp and Presner ( 2009 ), Berry ( 2011 ) and Hayles ( 2011 ); in Presner’s words, it is a new “Normal Humanities” (2010, 11). DH in general is a new scholarly method with its “focus on the identification of novel patterns in the data as against the principle of narrative and understanding” (Berry, 2011 , 13).

Schnapp and Presner note that the second wave is “ qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character” (2009, 2, original emphasis). These characteristics of the second wave “harnesses digital toolkits in the service of the Humanities’ core methodological strengths: attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation” (Schnapp and Presner, 2009 , 2). There are increasing number of scholarly practices across the humanities as shown in the examples below that reflect the characteristic applications, as well as the significance and impact of digital technology, in the second wave of DH. Before reviewing the three selected approaches in recent works of DH 2.0 that form the path to discussion on the importance of embodiment and haptic experience in this context, it is important to reiterate that this article acknowledges and extends upon the characteristics of DH 2.0 to propose a prospective on bodily action. The experiential, emotive and generative characteristics of DH 2.0 are every concrete bodily action actualised in the process of DH practice, while moving in and out of actual and virtual spaces, seeing the collective data through individual eyes, and conducting close reading on data from distance reading, etc. are rethought in terms of bodily action and lived experience. DH practice is bodily inclusive in which there is only bodily action to count on, a digital event as culturally embodied and spatially situated.

Recent research in DH 2.0 has addressed complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation, while many fields across the humanities have incorporated approaches and arguments from DH for their own core concerns. Of particular interest to this article, there are three selected approaches concerning cultural issues, minimising digital technologies in practice, and practicing in a situated space/place, which support the proposal for the bodily inclusive in DH practice that co-produces ‘digitised’ knowledge and becomes the bodily digital.

Firstly, concerns in traditional humanities involve digital technologies, such as the commitment of some DH scholars to antiracism and feminism discussions as well as Black studies. For example, Prince et al. ( 2022 ) call for a more equitable field based on the current challenging and difficult situation confronting DH Black scholars. Adams ( 2022 ) examines how Black fans use social media platforms to engage fandoms of contemporary Black popular cultural productions. Similar approaches in DH has been flourishing in cultural studies, gender studies, and minority/marginalised group studies in relation to topics such as colonialism (Alpert-Abrams and McCarl, 2021 ), feminist, queer and LGBTQ+ issues (Ketchum, 2020 ), exclusion of women and scholars of colour (Nowviskie, 2015 ), and how DH is reinforcing a gender gap in the field and a gendering of DH work itself (Wernimont, 2013 ; Olofsson, 2015 ; Mandell, 2016 ). The voices and opinions in the above groups across various studies are critical to understanding the social and cultural atmosphere and political climate, thereby forging a more inclusive path towards understanding society. The digital technologies engaged in the above research are seen as part of the social and cultural environment in facilitating the making of their qualitative comments as well as interpretations of their core concerns in the cultural domain.

Secondly, there is an enquiry about the necessity of using digital technologies, termed the concept of digital minimalism, or minimal computing according to Risam ( 2018 ). Gil ( 2015 ) questions “what do we need?” in an effort to reflect upon and recalibrate the increasing use of digital technologies. Wythoff ( 2022 ) notes that minimal computing focusses on “cultural practices rather than tools or platforms” and “prioritizes a humanist approach to technology”. Risam describes minimal computing as “a range of cultural practices that privilege making do with available materials to engage in creative problem-solving and innovation” (2018, 43). In actual practice, the concept is manifested as minimal design, maximum justice and minimal technical language (Sayer, 2016 ) to privilege wider access and openness to community. For example, Risam and Edwards ( 2017 ) practice minimal computing by embracing small data sets, local archives, and freely available platforms for creating small-scale digital humanities projects. Privileging making and shifting focus back on cultural practice in traditional thought, digital minimalism accommodates the impact of digital technologies and ensures wider access by reducing the use of high-tech and instead regarding digital technologies as merely tools and platforms. This approach is conscious of the body-tool relation and critiques the idea of ‘the more, or stronger, the better’. Despite partially disagreeing with digital minimalism’s strategy that seemingly has a sense of ‘withdrawal’ from, and reluctance towards, ever-growing digital technologies, we appreciate their thinking on making , which connects with bodily inclusive action in our argument. We thereby propose that the bodily inclusive in DH practices become digital events to embrace the ever-increasing use of digital technologies in everyday life. The full discussion on bodily embodiment in relation to digital technology is in the penultimate section of this article. Before that, we will outline the next approach concerning the DH lab/centre as a situated place/space that indirectly points to bodily actions taking place within, which is of interest to the article in terms of the emotive and generative sense of knowledge production/transfer in DH 2.0.

Thirdly, discussion on space and place is called situated research practice in DH (Oiva and Pawlicka-Deger, 2020 ), whereby research activities are typically undertaken in DH centres and laboratories in terms of ‘situatedness’. Many scholars argue that the DH lab/centre is more than a physical place. For example, based on a review of the ‘laboratory turn’ in the humanities, Pawlicka-Deger ( 2020 ) notes that the space and place of lab/centre has been conceptualised in relation to ways of thinking, communicating and working entailing new social practices and new research modes. There are five models of DH labs Footnote 4 that can be categorised and analysed to reflect the lab/centre as concept, initiative, and programme.

While the DH lab/centre is conceptually regarded as a problem-based project rather than a physical workspace, the emphasis is on collaboration, experimentation, and hands-on practices in the laboratorial space. That is to say, for example, “the manner in which the knowledge-transfer activities in DH communities are facilitated affects the knowledge they produce” (Oiva, 2020 ). Exploring the situatedness of DH lab/centre, Malazita et al. ( 2020 ) claim that “laboratory structures and cultures produce specific kinds of knowledge practitioners…[who] in turn produce and police the boundaries of legitimate and recognizable knowledge work…[a]ll of these productions are, in part, results of particular institutional and disciplinary positions”. Moreover, “knowledge is inseparable from the communities that create it, its context, structure, and the means with which it is produced and shared” (Oiva, 2020 ). Acknowledging the main idea of Oiva and Malazita et al. that it is important to understand the practices, structures, and the community underlying knowledge construction, we nonetheless argue there is also the presence of the body, which is culturally embodied and historically inherited, in the situated laboratorial space. Lived and immanent bodily interactions take place in the situated DH labs/centres and communities simultaneously while transferring/producing knowledge.

Bodily interaction actively constructs the DH lab/centre as a cultural space via the professional practice undertaken within as a dynamic process, an event of happening. Borrowing the concept of epistemic culture (Knorr Cetina, 1999 ), Malazita et al. ( 2020 ) point out that in terms of “the material and epistemic production of DH labs, their spaces, cultures, practices, and products…humanities scholars…must be produced as epistemic subjects through the interactions of their education, the objects, the field, and the documentary and critical writings about the objects”. To extend on this, movement in terms of the sociological body can add an extra lens to think through the situatedness of DH practice in a more complex and medium-specific way. The narrative of bodily movement is about historical context and analytical depth that is always engaged in critiques and interpretations.

Research method

The article proposes an alternative approach for DH practice as process-inclusive in the sense that bodily interaction, when operating or accommodating digital technologies while moving in and out of virtual and actual space for example, is itself critical and humane at a bodily level. The article builds on previous studies on embodiment (Liu, 2018 , 2022 ), actual and virtual space (Liu, 2020 ; Liu and Lan, 2020 , 2021 ) and bodily movement (Liu and Lan, 2021 ; Lan and Liu, 2023 ) to rethink bodily inclusive DH practice. After reviewing the discussion of DH 1.0 emphasising on the development of technology and analysis on cultural content, as well as of DH 2.0 with attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation. Our proposal on the bodily approach in the process of knowledge making in understanding DH practice is particularly timely as the boundary, in terms of bodily experience, between actual and virtual space is increasingly blurred. In other words, the article predicts in the forthcoming Digital Humanities 3.0 wherein bodily accommodated digital technologies actively contribute to knowledge production in understanding the world.

The body, or the sociological body, has been extensively studied in a multitude of ways in sociological thinking and research by scholars such as Synnott ( 1993 ), Featherstone et al. ( 1991 ), Strathern ( 1996 ), Csordas ( 1994 ), Turner ( 1996 ), and Williams and Bendelow ( 1998 ); their intellectual contributions are discussed elsewhere and will not be repeated here. Since the body has been reconciled as “simultaneously a social and biological entity which is in a constant state of becoming” (Shilling, 1993 , 27), the body in this article is understood as a historically inherited and culturally embodied being (Liu, 2018 ) that is acted upon by institutions (Foucault, 1991 ). Bodily actions from everyday life—derived from the sociological concept of body techniques, or in Mauss’s term “the habitus” (1979, 101), which are “forms of embodied pre-reflective understanding, knowledge or reason…[that] distinguish and differentiate social groups” (Crossley, 2005 , 7–8) and have their own cultural interests and political motivations—are extended into the world of the virtual. Body technique is a “learned and incorporated skill” (Ravn, 2017 , 59), whereby the body first “act[s] to the skill qua thematized goal” and then acts “from” the skill (Leder, 1990 , 32) toward further goals. The body itself is in action to practice in DH research. The body in action, by exemplifying the disciplinary mechanisms or control in everyday society for example, is manipulating of, or being compromised by, digital technology; thereby, the bodily experience is impacted upon in ways of seeking, obtaining, selecting, analysing and interpreting data. Being subjective and critical in traditional humanities can be always present in DH, but co-produced with digital technologies.

Kinesics is the term coined in the study of bodily movements according to Birdwhistell ( 1952 ; 1970 ), which investigates and interprets nonverbal behavior (Ekman and Friesen, 1969 ), Footnote 5 such as facial expression (Raman and Singh, 2006 ), Footnote 6 gestures (Andersen, 1999 ), Footnote 7 posture (Pearse and Pearse, 2005 ; Patel, 2014 ), and bodily movements. Acknowledging studies conducted over the past decades with various emphasis and empirical parameters, bodily movement are taken as symbolic or metaphorical in social and cultural interaction. For example, body gestures (Kendon, 1981 ) and hand gestures (McNeill, 1992 ) are systemic and socially learned, Footnote 8 which touching behaviors and movements can express the internal state of a person of being arousal or anxiety (Andersen, 1999 ). The haptic experience of touching is tactile contact with oneself, objects, and others.

This article proposes a focus on the concrete actions of the body in practice mobilising/compromising digital technologies as an essential part of the research activity where new bodily experience emerges. The shift in focus to the bodily inclusive is timely in rethinking the current position of DH as being neither discipline nor interdiscipline. Instead, advanced digital technology, such as the forthcoming Web 3.0, is able to significantly narrow the boundary between virtual and actual bodily experience, whereby bodily inclusive DH practice can be seen as an event, a production itself; therefore, the embodied bodily movement is a critical response to research activities regardless of the research outcome. Humanities is the pursuit in which new knowledge is produced, and the anticipated Digital Humanities 3.0 is the process of experiencing in which new (digital) bodily experience is realised, thereby affecting the understanding of the world. In a parallel discussion, Fish ( 2012 ) notes, “Each reorganization (sometimes called a ‘deformation’) creates a new text that can be reorganized in turn and each new text raises new questions that can be pursued to the point where still newer questions emerge”, which implies that research is embedded in the ongoing process of (re)making and experimenting.

Therefore, moving away from debates concerning technology, method or criticalness etc., while embracing qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive and generative characteristics, thinking bodily action, humanities and digital technology altogether is to propose the situatedness of the bodily encounter in the process of making in the digital age. In this paradigm, the certainty of knowledge that researchers arrive at is not due to what things have been done but how things have been done upon every single bodily movement, wherein bodily experience is essential in knowledge making in the digital environment. Digital technology is more than a neutral medium, rather it has grown to actively contribute towards co-forming the realisation of the world. Two cases are examined to reflect DH practice as embodied action. The first is the practice of a fashion designer whose traditional garment making skills intertwine with digital technology resulting in new bodily experience and haptic knowledge in mixed realities. Footnote 9 The second reviews a research practice on an online community using data analysis in which the bodily inclusive proposes an alternative approach.

Digital Humanities 3.0 as embodied act: making, interpreting and criticalness

Kirschenbaum notes that DH is more akin to a common methodological outlook (2012), which perhaps downgrades the significance of DH and its potential to be a new space in comprehending and forming the world. Some scholars question whether the centre and the boundaries of DH remain amorphous (McCarty, 2016 ); Svensson ( 2016 ), for example, describes DH as being in a liminal state, that it is neither discipline nor interdiscipline. DH seems to have huge potentiality; however, at the same time, its promised future is continually delayed in which its highly anticipated impact has not yet been fully realised (Alvarado, 2012 ).

The role of humanities scholars always concerns the production and interpretation of cultural materials in constantly changing cultural and social environments, rather than focussing on technological progress (Fitzpatrick, 2010 ), which is also coherent with Earhart’s view that DH should engage theoretically with technology, not merely with the content of technologies (2012a; 2012b). Cong-Huyen ( 2015 ) and Parikka ( 2012 ), for example, mobilise critical theories to bridge the ‘natural’ progression of technology and critical thinking on cultural materials. This article argues that, on the premise of ever-strengthening digital technologies, bodily movement becomes the meeting point of the two, whereby immanent and irreducible bodily actions operate technologies in the ways to favour the latter’s own interest, while the operational technologies reinforce the users in perceiving the world, in which actions are taken in field study, searching for materials, visualising the research, and enhancing decision making, as well as accommodating various digital technologies in the process of knowledge making. Bodily movement is specific to the medium with attention paid to details and complexity, wherein the body is cultural and physical in its historical context, which in turn diversifies the understanding of DH 2.0 practice. Moreover, the bodily experience in everyday research practice could become prominent in and provide alternative ways of thinking to DH 3.0. The interaction between body and digital technologies in everyday experience determines what knowledge can be produced and how it is to be presented. Concrete actions determine bodily experience and subsequent understanding of the world, which are what humanities scholars work with, and are affected by and inseparable from. From everyday practice, new realisations emerge in bodily actions and reactions situated in the digital environment, some of which are immature, controversial or even handicapped, yet they actively contribute to the perception of the world.

Negroponte ( 1995 ) notes that digitalisation has created a new living space, and people in the digital age live more in the virtual space constructed by digital technology. What is emphasised here is that while people study, work and communicate in this space, regardless of whether it is actual, virtual or mixed, bodily actions are taking place to create new literature, art, history and even culture in the virtual interaction. After more than two decades later, the increasing integration of body and technology allows DH practice to become an event, in which the embodied body acts and reacts in a situated digital environment. Therefore, bodily actions itself is the process of knowledge making that leads to new realisation and ‘digitised’ knowledge.

Narrowing the ‘gap’ – connecting body to DH in digital fashion design practice

The selected and synthesised historical trajectories of the growth of DH not only demonstrate the increasing impact of digital technologies upon everyday life, but also pave the way towards conceptualising the connection of DH to the body. The observable ever-strengthening technologies and deepening of everyday engagement have prompted the rethinking of the situated body in terms of DH. This brings the ideas of ‘digitised’ body, ‘digitised’ knowledge and embodiment into focus, especially given the high number of everyday experiences involving the mix of actual and virtual realities. The realisation of dematerialization does not entail embracing virtuality by abandoning materiality. But rather, dematerialisation reflects a new type of ‘digitised’ knowledge and embodiment in mixed reality. The everyday body can visually experience the simulated virtual space while the body remains situated in the actual environment in terms of haptic experience, for example.

The haptic, as a somatic sense of touch, has been studied extensively in the field of psychology with recent scholarship focusing on touch or non-visual senses (Classen, 1997 ; Stoller, 1997 ; Geurts, 2005 ; Howes, 2003 ; Feld, 2005 ; Paterson, 2007 ). Bodily actions are embodied, tactile and spatial experiences, that arise from touching and sensing via skin, for example, and provide a sense of immediacy for the body when interacting with actual space; it is “like a journey inward into the fibrous and synaptic entanglements of a diffuse nerve-muscle system” (Paterson, 2011 , 266). Bodily actions in a physical space combine several somatic senses, namely, the modalities of proprioception as the body’s muscular tension, kinaesthesia as the sense of the body’s movement, and vestibular sense as a sense of balance (Paterson, 2007 , 4). That is to say, apart from our visual perception, virtual space is also experienced and understood through our skin, such as through touch. Digital fashion designers in everyday practice, for instance, are visually immersed in the world of the virtual, and whose bodies have ‘retaught’ their physical experience via virtual experience. This is a type of haptic experience embodied in digital action, or digitised embodiment, which impacts upon the actual body continuously into their everyday lives.

Scholarly investigations on digitised embodiment have examined how the body interacts with, and is (re)configured by, digital technologies, focusing on various increasingly digitised environments—such as “sensor-saturated physical environments” (Lupton, 2017 , 202), where the body is exposed to, grows with, and is constantly under surveillance—that configurate and reconfigure bodily actions (Bauman and Lyon, 2012 ; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011 ; Kitchin, 2014 ). The body is digitised and recorded constantly while surfing online, walking under surveillance, talking on the smartphone, body scanning for health checks, etc., hereby reproduced by/in the digitised environment. In other words, digital data are generated and used to further discipline bodily behaviours. The complex relation between body and digital technology is full of entanglements, as well as inextricabilities in terms of sociomaterialism, which argues social and materiality aspects are entangled in an organisational life (Orlikowski, 2007 ). In Orlikowski and Scott’s words: “sociomateriality is integral, inherent, and constitutive, shaping the contours and possibilities of everyday organizing” (2008, 463). The inextricable, intertwining in-between reflects that the body is a digital data assemblage (Lupton, 2015 ). The entanglements in, and co-configuration of, each other, between body and digital technology, reflect a type of bodily knowing that is inclusive of haptic experience.

Bodily knowing, apart from being related to individual consciousness of the body’s physical conditions, is the understanding of and interaction with its surroundings, which are usually occupied by other bodies and objects. As Lupton notes, “[w]e experience the world as fleshly bodies, via the sensations and emotions configured through and by our bodies as they relate to other bodies and to material objects and spaces” (2017, 201). The body extends beyond its physical entity and is distributed into the inhabited space involving embodied interactions and affective responses, whereby embodiment is a relational assemblage (Lupton, 2017 ). While feelings are produced through interaction between self and world (Labanyi, 2010 , 223), the body in environment touches and is touched.

Acknowledging that the virtual is anthropological (Boellstorff, 2008 , 237), anthropological methods can be applied to investigating the world of the virtual by (re)interpreting socio-cultural relations manifested in virtual space, such as social status, gender issues, disabilities, ethnicities, class, etc. For example, scholars in videogame studies investigate bodily representations in virtual space, with focus on the presence, absence, and types of the portrayal of social groups in terms of identity, gender, and sexuality (Downs and Smith, 2005 ; Heintz-Knowles et al. 2001 ; Janz and Martis, 2007 ; Williams et al. 2009 ), and the phenomenological experiences of engaging with third-person videogames, which the player controls the game through avatars that results in control of three bodies: the avatar’s body, player’s own body, and visual perspective of a “game body” (Crick, 2011 , 262). Footnote 10 Bodily actions may be conducted in actuality, yet their simulated impact virtually can achieve certain new actions created in the situated mixed reality where body capacities and boundaries can be rethought in terms of situatedness. The bodily actions conducted while comprehending the mixed environment via haptic experience produce new ‘digitised’ knowledge and become the bodily digital. The case study on digital fashion design practice is analysed to substantiate the thinking of the bodily digital whereby the body in everyday practice/life is the product of digital actions that, in turn, lead to ‘digitised’ knowledge.

Designing digital cloth requires relatively fewer intensive actions, mostly limited to the operation of computer devices, including typing on the keyboard, dragging and clicking the mouse, etc., compared to traditional methods in the process of garment making, such as sewing, stitching and cutting, which involve the participation of the whole body, where the texture of fabrics is sensed and understood mainly via touch. When touching occurs, somatosensory signals are transduced by nerves, either as the pressure felt by the designer’s fingertips pressing against the textile, or the temperature felt from the warmth of the fabric on the skin. The haptic knowledge about textiles is embedded in designers who were initially trained in traditional methods; subsequently, their bodily experience casts the approach and fosters the understanding of digital garment making. Moreover, digital clothing, which require comparatively fewer complex bodily tasks in the process of making, is done in virtual space that prompts designers to rethink their bodily boundary and capacities in the mixed (in)tangible world. There is a correlation between a simple latitude action taken with minimum muscular tension, and achieving rather complex tasks in digital space. The narrowing ‘gap’ between the body and the digital is manifested in the case of digital fashion design practice that reflects how the haptic experience is digitised, and how the digital experience is bodily digital. Designers engaging with digital data assemblages are in turn managed and manipulated by the assemblages that impact upon their ways of knowing and embodiment in their practice that is situated in mixed reality. “Technologies discipline the body to better assimilate it to their requirements, their ways of seeing, monitoring and treating human flesh” (Lupton, 2017 , 203).

Fashion designers not only use 3D-technology to create digital prototyping and sampling of the garment for final visualisation, but also to think through, with and alongside the digital technologies and new media (Manovich, 2020 ; Hansen, 2006 ; Hayles, 2012 ), as supported by Johnston’s argument (2012) on the concept of autonomy in technology, which is originally from Kittler ( 1990 ). The digital transformation, called digital mediatisation or ‘digital fashion’ (Milne, 2019 ), in the investigation on fashion and its relation to digital media (Rocamora, 2017 , 505), takes place in many facets, such as fashion shows, collections design and retailing, that turn the products, wearers and environments partially or entirely virtual. Although many hurdles and challenges have been identified, such as how fashion design practice can create meaningful content for digital worlds (Tepe and Koohnavard, 2023 ), the shift to computer-aided design (CAD), such as CLO3D and Browzwear, is becoming popular in everyday design practice. The technology enables and enhances design processes operating under the concept of greener and more sustainable design, such as the use of digital 3D software in zero-waste fashion design practice (McQuillan, 2020 ) and 3D virtual prototyping as a new medium and influence on design methods and visual thinking (Siersema, 2015 ).

The digital work, entitled The Region ‘X’ , created by fashion designer Tianjiao Wang in 2022, with its theme on the human body intertwining with all things, is inspired by a movie called Annihilation (Garland, 2018 ). Wang is trained in traditional methods of garment making accompanied with essential knowledge and bodily skills, but has lately turned her attention to the digital field, creating collections using software. For example, the pattern cutting and silhouette of The Region ‘X’ are done by CAD and Photoshop respectively, and the virtual fabric reinforcement is manipulated in CLO3D, as shown in Fig. 1 . The sagging effect of cloth as a visual experimentation is done by Cinema 4D, which allows for continuous adjustments of the garment style and shape and detailed design in the virtual environment. RIZOMUV is used to arrange and disassemble the UV and to optimise the position of the panels. Painting the surface materials of the garment is then done by Adobe Substance 3D Painter, as shown in Fig. 2 . Accessories, such as hand decoration, shoes and hats, are created in Cinema 4D.

The visual experimentation, such as the sagging effect of cloth, is simulated in Cinema 4D. The virtual reality allows for continuous adjustments of the garment style and shape. Photo credit: Tianjiao Wang, 2023.

Wang experiments with painting on the surface of garment materials in Adobe Substance 3D Painter. Visually triggered ‘touch’ experience takes place in this practice. Photo credit: Tianjiao Wang, 2023.

Digital technology is used as a means of creating alternative fashion-related experiences for digital and hybrid spaces, introducing practitioners to possibilities beyond the construction of physical products through digital means. The concept has been widely implemented in contemporary fashion education; for example: new technologies are taught at fashion schools (Bain, 2022 ); new teaching models are associated with technology learning (Bertola and Colombi, 2021 ); digital skills are used in the fashion studio (Särmäkari, 2023 ); and body-diverse methods are used in designing dress in the digital age (Tepe, 2022 ). Yet, digital fashion is more than a visual festival; advanced digital technology is not a better tool than the sewing machine, for example. As shown in Wang’s case, the body interacts with and is situated in the mixed reality, where the sensorial body is in full operation and becomes bodily digital. The body is the product of digital actions and is a digital embodied being. Tactile experience, via touch and feel, which is essential for traditional designers in differentiating and selecting textures and materials that express individuality and create meanings, is significantly intertwined with visual experience in the digital space. In this sense, the texture and material of fabrics, such as wool, cotton, linen, synthetic polyester, etc., are identified by visual perception, given the capacity of CAD, such as CLO3D and Browzwear, to vividly delineate various textures on screen. In other words, the simulated materiality shown on screen is detected by visual means and ‘perceived’ by the body in front of the computer with haptic experience via touching the keypad, clicking on the mouse, etc. The digital design practice provokes the memory of bodily touching materials, which is reassured visually on screen, therefore that fabric is ‘touched’, ‘felt’ and selected. This mixed reality practice produces a type of haptic experience, which involves the visual. The intertwining of the body with mixed realities via visual and haptic experience makes the bodily digital or digital embodiment, in which ‘digitised’ knowledge is produced as the body becomes the product of digital actions (Fig. 3 ).

Photo credit: Tianjiao Wang, 2023.

Mobilising the bodily inclusive in research activity

Thinking digital technology (such as Web 3.0), humanities and contemporary theory of bodily embodiment altogether is being bodily inclusive in research activity. There are no identical bodily actions taking place, for example, among different scholars or by the same scholar in different projects, regardless of the methods used. The attention on bodily actions brings forth an alternative thought process to help with re-examining and improving incomplete research, offering a pathway other than a concrete conclusion as a traditional research outcome. Take for example Zhu’s ( 2021 ) analysis based on distance reading of 1500 review comments collected as a small fraction out of the total of 654,914 comments on the Internet platform Douban regarding the famous Chinese movie The Wandering Earth . Footnote 11 Review comments were collected solely from Douban, which means that data from other major Chinese online platforms are not taken into consideration. To go beyond Zhu’s limited conclusion on the movie, which attracted great public attention and opinion in the Douban community, the bodily inclusive approach can offer further possible work to be done in terms of the online users and the scholarly practice.

Online social media environment such as Douban have specific users in terms of gender, age, cultural background, social status, etc. as well as online behaviours that are relatively consistent. The 1500 comments were first screened and selected by Douban as the gatekeeper before being made available to viewers, including Zhu. Without an understanding of the criteria used by Douban in screening and selecting comments, that is to say, in determining what can or cannot be seen by viewers, the analysis of the 1500 comments could be misleading in reflecting the viewers’ genuine attitude towards the movie in the Douban community. Despite the current limitations of the research, thinking the bodily inclusive can alter the focus to, for instance, bodily actions of online users, who are differentiated in gender, age, cultural background and social status, moving in and out of actual and virtual space while operating and being operated by digital technologies, whereby digital bodily actions become an active part in perceiving and reflecting their perception and attitude towards the movie. There is a potential pathway for Zhu to pursue deeper understanding and to obtain further insights about the impact of the movie on the online community by focussing on the users’ bodily interactions in relation to digital technologies, Footnote 12 rather than relying on and being limited by the official screening of the comments against certain criteria and social values. For example, Piper investigates online reading concerning users’ hands (2012), that reading body in a digital environment requires greater haptic intelligence (McLaughlin, 2015 ). The impact of digitisation on tactility and the sensory responses of users (Mangen and Schilhab, 2012 ) reflects upon bodily actions. Online reading is a practice that is “material, embodied, and responsive to [the] environment” (Thomas, 2021 , 2), while the reading body in actions is tactile, situated, and creative.

Bodily actions, such as extending the arm and moving the fingers to grab a cup of tea in actual space, is studied within the scope of anthropology and social science, where bodily gesture and the action sequences reflect social status, gender issues, disabilities, ethnicities, individuality, etc., while meanings and interpretations are (re)produced. While research has extended into the world of the virtual to investigate the avatar as the representation of the body and its relation to other avatars in a virtual ‘socio-cultural’ environment for example (Villani et al. 2016 ; Freeman and Maloney, 2021 ), there is a body present in front of the computer screen whose tactile experience continues, and whose digitised embodiment reflects the intimate interconnection between DH and the body. That is to say, there is scope to observe and study the situated body of Internet users, acted upon by socio-cultural institutions, and how they exercise power and behave online via concrete bodily movement. Observing and measuring bodily gestures and movements in the way the users drink, smoke, talk, etc. while clicking the mouse, touching the screen, and typing the keyboard to make/delete online comments or ‘like’ things, can provide further insights in terms of the interrelationship between online and offline behaviours. Footnote 13 Furthermore, the interrelationship is mutually impactful between digital technologies and the body as culturally embodied and historically inherited being; bodily action in front of the computer screen is a reflection of this interrelationship.

To observe and study the bodily inclusive on both the scholars who are situated in a digital environment while conducting research activities, and certain groups of people acting online as the study objects, is to think the ‘gap’ and the moment of close encounter between the body and digital technologies. In other words, in the encounter of the two, the characteristics of DH 2.0 come into play as being at once qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive and generative, as well as being immanent and lived experience. Moreover, it is foreseeable that increased interactivity and user participation enabled by Web 2.0 (Davidson, 2012 ) are further strengthened by Web 3.0, in which bodily experience in actual and virtual space would be no longer separable for example. Thinking body, digital technology, and humanities altogether, along with the arrival of Web 3.0, is a means to image DH 3.0 in terms of the trans-disciplinary, focussing on the concept of the digital lived encounter.

Furthermore, thinking the bodily inclusive in the process of DH activities is to say Zhu’s research is more than offering a conclusion with more or less limitation though, drawn from database analysis that is always partial and shown in visualised patterns that have to be simplified to allow wider access. Yet, a clear pathway of how the multiple decisions made and led to the conclusion is reflected on the bodily actions. For instance, the process of research involved a large number of Zhu’s bodily actions in interacting with the database that are mutually impactful and can be tracked and reviewed anytime afterwards. In other words, the making in DH practice is a creating of indexicality, a sign pointing to some aspect of its context of occurrence, where each interaction of the involved data as the context, which is selected, omitted, (re)edited and (re)ordered, projects the occurrence of bodily action in front of the computer screen. Every bodily gesture and movement taken contributes to the perception formed by the body towards the world, and impacts upon knowledge production. Therefore, Zhu’s research subject matter is ‘1500 review comments’, but it can also be equally thought that the subject is the work of Zhu’s series of bodily movements interacting with the data in real time in mixed space as an extension of Zhu’s cultural body. The making in DH practice is also the creation of human indexicality. Thinking the bodily inclusive is to acknowledge and unveil the process of knowledge production in DH practice where the constant interaction and mutual impact of operating digital technologies throughout the research is full of criticalness and decision making.

Thinking the bodily inclusive is to go beyond the earlier productive work via traditional methods, which has been erased by the process with only a conclusion at the end. There is no such a thing called ‘raw’ data that seems innocent, as data is mined, collected, stored, sorted, (re)visited, extracted, analysed, deleted and restored via and by bodily actions. There is a reshuffle and a re-ordering and therefore re-interpretion of the data every time a bodily action takes place. Hence, the bodily actions in the research process reflect and visualise the pathway of certain bodily experience gradually accumulated that contribute to the production of knowledge, apart from and along with the fixed and must-be-arrived-at ‘conclusion’ of research.

Acknowledging humanities scholars don’t do things as usual and simply extend their traditional activities enabled by the advantages of networked digital technology, DH transcends beyond a discipline and a research field. It can be seen as a response of and a new exploration in the humanities to the digital age. Therefore, the article proposes an alternative approach for understanding and engaging the concept of the sociological body in order to introduce the bodily inclusive in DH practice, which hints at the possibilities of ‘digitised’ knowledge production and haptic knowledge in upcoming DH 3.0. Digital technology changes the pathway of bodily experience created in research and conceptualisation, in which bodily action is characterised and partially formed by digital technology. The value of the humanities embodied in and reflected on bodily actions would inform and simultaneously be informed by the ways technologies are manipulated, in which certain knowledge is produced and perception towards the world is formed. In other words, the interaction between body and digital technology, which is capable of diminishing the boundary between actual and virtual experience for example, contributes to the perception towards the world.

Apart from technology being a tool, a medium, a laboratory, or a vehicle for activism (Svensson, 2009 , 2010 ) in Web 2.0, bodily actions in upcoming DH 3.0 actively co-make the knowledge of and the understanding towards the world, embedded via the interaction with digital technology. Digital technology not just provides new ways for concepts to be communicated, but new ways to co-produce bodily actions. In a parallel discussion, Hogsden and Poulter consider digital experience “an alternative reciprocal model” (2012, 82) while King et al. regard the digital encounter as a “different category from physical encounters” (2016, 86). For Heim, “virtual worlds…do not simply reproduce the existential features of reality but transform them beyond immediate recognition” (1993, 32). In short, the use of digital technology offers a type of new bodily experience. Therefore, to think the significant engagement of digital technologies as the condition of and the impact upon bodily actions and experience in this process of knowledge production is to say that the certain knowledge is produced by, and can only be, the interactions between body and digital technology, which is how we understand new bodily experience in the digital age and the bodily digital, thereby the knowledge produced by the bodily digital is called ‘digitised’ knowledge.

Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this research as no data were generated or analysed.

DH is sometimes anti-disciplinary as it does not fit within traditional academic disciplines. Interdisciplinary brings scholars together across disciplines to create an integrated science instead of fragmented disciplines.

There are methods such as qualitative content analysis in communication study that coding is formed to reduce masses of information in traditional text, and variable matrix is subjected to statistical analysis. Further readings refer to Kuckartz ( 2014 ) and Schreier ( 2012 ).

Chinese scholars Chen Dakang and Li Xianping also tried to use this method to determine the copyright of A Dream of Red Mansions [紅樓夢] in the 1980s.

They are the center-type lab, techno-science lab, work station-type lab, social challenges-centric lab, and virtual lab (Pawlicka-Deger, 2020 ).

According to Ekman and Friesen, there are five categories of nonverbal behavior in terms of psychology.

Raman and Singh note the five basic physical descriptions of facial expressions, which are neutral, relaxed, tense, uplifted, and droopy.

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Kendon examines body gestures in terms of communication; and McNeill proposes a general classification of four types of hand gestures, including beat, deictic, iconic, and metaphoric.

I acknowledge the example that the digital practice of fashion designers might not be considered integral to DH discourses globally in some scholars’ thoughts. Nevertheless, the case supports the argument of how the haptic experience in physical space is re-mediated through digital technology.

According to Crick, the “game body” is “the software-simulated mobile camera that follows (or inhabits) a game character in a virtual world” (2011, 261).

Douban is one of the major Chinese online platforms providing information about novels, movies, TV series, music, stage plays, etc. where users can search, comment, communicate, and interact with each other. There are over 200 million registered users and over 400 million monthly active users as of the end of 2019. https://www.douban.com/partner/intro

Interactions include bodily movement and associate ‘motor action’.

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This work was funded by the project FRG-22-005-INT and granted by the Research Fund of Macau University of Science and Technology (FRG-MUST). Images provided by fashion designer Tianjiao Wang. The authors state and acknowledge that the article focuses on North American perspectives. The sources and references are primarily from North American contexts which shape the perspectives and argument, such as the framing of the analysis and discussion.

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Zhang, Z., Song, W. & Liu, P. Making and interpreting: digital humanities as embodied action. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 13 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02548-3

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The visual side of digital humanities: a survey on topics, researchers, and epistemic cultures

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Sander Münster, Melissa Terras, The visual side of digital humanities: a survey on topics, researchers, and epistemic cultures, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities , Volume 35, Issue 2, June 2020, Pages 366–389, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqz022

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Although the digital humanities have traditionally been conceived as a text-based discipline, both digital visualization techniques as well as visual analysis are increasingly used for research in various humanities disciplines. Since there are several overlaps in epistemic cultures of visually oriented and digitally supported research in art and architectural history studies, museology, and archaeology, as well as cultural heritage, we introduce ‘visual digital humanities’ as novel ‘umbrella’ term to cover research approaches in the digital humanities that are dependent on both consuming and producing pictorial, rather than textual, information to answer their humanities research questions. This article aims to determine this particular field of research in terms of (1) research topics, (2) disciplinary standards, and (3) a scholarly culture as well as (4) researchers’ habits and backgrounds. This study is intended to highlight a scope of phenomena and aspects of relevance. Information is gathered by interviews with researchers at London universities and workshops held in Germany and Sweden.

1.1 Visual oriented approaches in the digital humanities

Despite various attempts ( Kirschenbaum, 2010 ; Alvarado, 2011 ; Gold, 2012 ; Carter, 2013 ; Terras et al. , 2013 ), the definition of digital humanities is still blurred and heterogeneous ( Alvarado, 2011 ; Gibbs, 2011 ). From a historical perspective, the digital humanities have evolved since the mid-2000s through the development of an independent epistemic culture from the historical computer science and ‘Humanities Computing’ ( Hockey, 2004 ; Davidson, 2008 ; Svensson, 2009 , 2010 ; Nyhan and Flinn, 2016 ). There is also a broad consensus that digital humanities deal with ‘the application of technology to humanities work’ ( Gibbs, 2011 ). However, there is still controversy about the use of digital methods. That comprises the questions whether digital humanities are ‘worthy of an academic department’ by means of a sufficient level of academic rigor ( Terras, 2006a , p. 230), whether an object of research is limited to digitally supported research methods or dealing with all aspects of digitally supported scholarship ( Stam, 1997 ; Unsworth, 2000 ; Beaudoin, 2009 ; Beaudoin and Brady, 2011 ; Zorich, 2012 ; Kemman et al. , 2014 ; Long and Schonfeld, 2014 ; Hersey et al. , 2015 ) and finally, what are their unique research benefits. With regards to that latter aspect and from the perspective of humanities research, especially novel qualities and opportunities for pattern recognition, an easy scalability and editing of information are mentioned ( Moretti, 2007 ; Bodenhamer et al. , 2010b ; Ch'ng et al. , 2013 ; Münster, 2016c ).

The data foci of digital humanities are texts, images and objects. While the use of digital methods in the text-oriented disciplines is currently widely established and standardized ( Bundesministerium Für Bildung Und Forschung, 2014 , p. 10), a scope of digital methods related to images and other visual objects based on vision rather than close reading remains—despite various attempts ( Bentkowska-Kafel et al. , 2006 ; Arnold and Geser, 2008 ; Frischer and Dakouri-Hild, 2008 ;, Bodenhamer et al. , 2010a ; Ch'ng et al. , 2013 )—essentially uncharted. Possible reasons may be seen in the ‘diverse nature of the methods used’ in disciplines focussing on these types of artifacts like art and architectural history, cultural heritage studies or museology ( Long and Schonfeld, 2014 , p. 48), but also in the heterogeneous level of establishment of digital research methods in those disciplines ( Hicks, 2006 ). A common bond in visually oriented and digitally supported research in art and architectural history studies, 1 museology, 2 and archaeology, 3 as well as Cultural Heritage 4 may be their grounding in visual literacy. The concept of visual literacy “refers to a group of largely acquired abilities, i.e., the abilities to understand (read), and use (write) images [and spatial objects], as well as to think and learn in terms of images [and spatial objects]” ( Avgerinou, 2001 , p. 26). Within their meta-analysis, Avgerinou and Pettersson affirmed ‘art, philosophy, linguistics, psychology’ as parent disciplines for visual literacy as well as ‘visual thinking, visual learning & teaching, visual perception, and communication’ as the main constructs that underly it ( Avgerinou and Pettersson, 2011 , p. 4). Only a few publications link visual literacy and digital humanities. Jessop refers to the widely established London Charter ( Beacham et al. , 2006 ) as a ‘possible framework for the development of appropriate methods and standards’ for the creation of visual content in the humanities ( Jessop, 2008 ). Since the concept of visual literacy originates in education, there are some publications about didactical and motivational aspects concerning visual literacy and (digital) humanities. As one example, Barber investigated digital Storytelling techniques for teaching history ( Barber, 2016 ).

Visual literacy skills are not naturally given but must be learned ( Avgerinou and Pettersson, 2011 ). Additionally, visual reasoning strategies highly relate to professional backgrounds ( Goodwin, 1994 ). Since we would expect commonalities beyond the artefact between the disciplines dealing with vision in the digital humanities, we introduce ‘visual digital humanities’ as a novel ‘umbrella’ term to cover research approaches in the digital humanities dependent on both consuming and producing pictorial and spatial, rather than textual, information to answer their humanities research questions.

1.2 A definition of visual digital humanities

Visual digital humanities encompass the computational supported research on complex visual information to treat research questions and interests from the humanities. 5 According to Heusinger, computers support the work in art history, and, in a wider scope, in all visually oriented humanities disciplines, concerning aspects of:

Data collection, e.g. through digitization;

Data retrieval from database records with the transfer of knowledge;

Examining visual humanities questions, e.g. a composition of complex figurative paintings;

Reconstructing, simulating, and producing objects; and

Administering and organizing people and objects. 6

In our definition a range includes the analysis of complex visual information, their collection and semantic enrichment, as well as the creation of imagery in context of

image analysis (e.g. the pattern analysis of large-scale image collections)

perception based techniques (e.g. the visuospatial analysis of architectural objects)

spatial modelling (e.g. 3D reconstruction of historical architecture)

visualization (e.g. sketching for visuospatial reasoning). 7

Therefore, a common bond can be found in the facts that objects are cultural heritage artifacts and images, and that scholars in visual digital humanities are using technologies to ‘understand (read), and use (write) images [and spatial objects], as well as to think and learn in terms of images [and spatial objects]’ ( Horton, 1983 ) in humanities work.

We have introduced visual digital humanities from a theoretical perspective: our interest is now to investigate it empirically in order to specify its characteristics. Against this background, our research is intended to answer the following questions:

How do researchers enter the visual digital humanities?

Which are research topics and methods in the visual digital humanities?

What are standards and challenges in visual digital humanities?

Is there a specific scholarly culture in the visual digital humanities?

The outcome should be a state of the art sketch as well as implications for further organizational development, software design, and educational practice. While our approach is primarily based on qualitative empirical research methods, the intended outcome is to build hypothesis on the scope of the field of visual digital humanities, or those using and generating digital pictoral rather than textual information in the humanities.

How do you investigate the characteristics of a scholarly area? Several approaches focusing on historical, philosophical, and sociological aspects ( Becher, 1989 ; Krishnan, 2009 ), and various methods for the investigation of researchers and academic fields by empirical methods are provided by Science and Technology Studies (STS). A prominent method characterizes fields of research by specific epistemic cultures in terms of different ‘architectures of empirical approaches, specific constructions of the referent, particular ontologies of instruments, and different social machines’ ( Knorr-Cetina, 1999 , p. 3), different techniques to gain insights, different vocabularies, different publication bodies, and habits ( Cetina and Reichmann, 2015 ). According to this approach, scholarly fields are characterized to ‘(a) have a particular object of research […], (b) have a body of accumulated specialist knowledge […], (c) have theories and concepts […], (d) use specific terminologies […], (e) have developed specific research methods […], and (f) must have some institutional manifestation in the form of subjects taught at universities or colleges […]’ ( Krishnan, 2009 ). Shared narratives are also important facilitators of a disciplinary culture, which has been investigated in Digital Humanities (c.f. Nyhan and Flinn, 2016 ). On a more operational level, the community of practice approach originally introduced by Lave and Wenger (1991) defines that these communities are marked by mutual engagement, a joint enterprise as well as a shared repertoire of knowledge and culture ( Wenger, 1998 ). Against this background, three areas are of interest for our investigation:

Scholars working in visual digital humanities

Fields of research, topics and methods used by these scholars

Institutionalization & disciplinary culture of these scholars.

2.1 Scholars in visual digital humanities

Research regarding scholarly behaviour often relies on analysing the publication record. With regards to a scholarly area of visual digital humanities and its adjacent fields like digital heritage, Hicks (2006) stated that publication habits as well as research habits widely spread between single disciplines in the (digital) humanities. Similarly, Leydesdorff et al. (2011) examined the disciplinary canon in humanities and digital humanities by employing bibliometric methods. With regards to a scholarly community within the digital humanities, Terras (2006b ) reported that until 2006 especially US-, Canadian-, and UK-based researchers contributed to academic discourse. Similarly, Grandjean performed a social network analysis of Twitter to map the digital humanities community ( Grandjean, 2016 ). Specifically for digital heritage, Scollar (1997) investigated the Conference on Computer Application in Archaeologies (CAA) from 1973 until 1996, and ( Münster and Ioannides, 2015 ) reviewed the Proceedings of CAA, DH, CIPA, VAST, 3DArch, and EUROMED between 1990 and 2015. As a result of both studies, researchers in the fields of digital heritage are primarily located in Mediterranean countries and have backgrounds in various disciplines—along with information technologies and humanities, these are primarily architecture, geo- and natural sciences. Secondly, information habits of visual digital humanities scholars are the focus of various studies. Since older investigations found large differences in information behaviour between scholars in different disciplines ( Tenopir and King, 2008 ), nowadays many scholars in art history as well as in architecture intensively rely on digital information as well as perform visual search strategies ( Beaudoin and Brady, 2011 ; Münster et al. , 2018 ). While Liu (2009) described general requirements for scholars in the field of humanities, Sprüker (2011) defined a set of competencies required to cope specifically with digital 3D reconstruction and visualization.

With regards to empirical investigations on computational literacy of visual humanities scholars, previous research draws an uneven terrain: for art creating scholars, Mason states that they are more ‘library-literate than previous research on artists might have suggested’ ( Mason and Robinson, 2011 ), while Elam (2007 , p. 6) notes that art historians lack digital technological competency in terms of ‘rather limited awareness of electronic resources and haven’t fully developed the skills to utilize them to their fullest potential’.

2.2 Fields of research and topics

What are fields of research in the digital humanities? Beside the already mentioned investigation done by Terras (2006b ) on publications prior to 2006, Scott performed a similar analysis for the DH 2017 conference submissions ( Weingart, 2016 ) and Tang et al. (2017) for journal articles in that field as well as Given and Willson (2018 ) in particular for textual oriented digital humanities. A community identified by Terras’ analysis exclusively dealt with textual and—few—image sources. In contrast, digital heritage related aspects as visualization, geospatial analysis or VR/AR were present in Scott’s 2017’s TOP-50 keyword list. Similarly, Tang et al. found out topics as 3D or Visualization less frequent occurring as keywords of academic journals in the field of Digital Humanities than textmining or TEI. 8 If visual content is only occasionally mentioned by a digital humanities community as defined by ADHO, 9 where does a discourse on visual digital heritage takes place instead? It can be stated that these topics have a long history. A very early bibliography specifically on images was compiled by Nowviskie (2002 ) in 2001. Much research on these topics is carried out by cultural heritage studies as well as by applying disciplines like archaeologies, museology or art and architectural history. With regards to that latter community, Drucker (2013) sketches a historical evolution as well as a current state of application of digital methods in art history. Complementary to this, Kohle (2013 ) defined fields of supplement by digital tools and practices in art history. The scope of topics of relevance for digital museology is currently being examined by the EU funded ViMM network (2017) , which started in 2016. Similarly, many texts describe a comprehensive state of the art as well as methodologies for digital archaeology (e.g. Evans and Daly, 2006 ; Kansa et al. , 2011 ; Frischer and Dakouri-Hild, 2008 ). Furthermore, there are many standards and guidelines as well as rules defined and discussed for dealing with historical content ( Sürül et al. , 2003 ; Beacham et al. , 2006 ; Pfarr, 2009 ; Bendicho, 2011 ; Kiouss et al. , 2011 ). Despite the broad variety of approaches and topics, digital cultural heritage evolved to a specific academic field with conferences, journals, and various frequently contributing researchers and institutions ( Münster, 2017b ). Particularly for monuments and art research the scholarly community is driven by researchers from European countries and especially Italy with a background in humanities. Most prominent research areas are data acquisition and management, visualization, or analysis. Recent topics are for instance unmanned airborne vehicle (UAV)-based 3D surveying technologies, augmented and virtual reality visualization, metadata and paradata standards for documentation, and virtual museums. Moreover, conference series are most relevant for a scientific discourse, and especially EU projects set pace as most important research endeavours.

Finally, a definition of topics took place by curriculum setting initiatives. From the latter point of view, Sahle et al. (2013) defined a core curriculum which is intended to serve as a blueprint for a design of digital humanities courses in German academia—similarly, Svensson (2009 ) defined areas of interest for an international landscape in digital humanities. With regards to visual digital humanities, there is still no wide consensus on a specific education paradigm, and larger studies on the education of digital methods in visual digital humanities are still missing ( Sprünker, 2013 , p. 405). A set of topics of relevance for digital heritage in particular was defined by the ITN training network and comprised especially surveying database and visualization technologies ( Ioannides, 2014 ).

2.3 Institutionalization and disciplinary culture

While the system that is still most established to classify epistemic spheres is ‘disciplines’, 10 an important characteristic of most current research work is their cross-disciplinarity ( Krishnan, 2009 ). Against this background, various new scientific fields arose, which are constructed around certain methods or approaches and often connect to multiple disciplines. 11

Especially from the perspective of digital humanities there is much research on aspects of institutionalization and culture (cf. Hayles, 2009 ; Svensson, 2010 ; Nyhan and Flinn, 2016 ). A joint object of research in (visual) digital humanities is defined by Alvarado in reference to Panofsky as ‘[…] the records left by man’ ( Alvarado, 2011 )—products and traces of human intellectual labour. On aspects of institutionalization, a discourse is primarily driven by curriculum setting initiatives. Since there are various publications providing an overview on course programs ( Terras, 2006a ; Duwe and Meffert, 2008 ), institutions ( Stergios, 2016 ), and organizational habits ( Liu, 2009 ; Svensson, 2009 ; Svensson, 2010 ) in digital humanities, no comparable overview is yet known for visual digital humanities in particular. An important feature is the interdisciplinary nature of a collaboration in digital humanities. Especially in the German-speaking world, there is a distinction between e(nhanced) humanities, collaboration between humanities and computer science ( BMBF, 2014 ), as well as digital humanities as a ‘hybrid discipline’ ( Cologne Center for eHumanities, 2011 ), which includes approaches and methods of both disciplines. Since the quality of cooperation is still discussed in literature, it is undoubted that cross-disciplinary cooperation is a central characteristic of (visual) digital humanities. In contrast to philosophical approaches, there is little empirical research on practices and users of digital reconstruction (cf. Huvila, 2014 ). Huvila investigated user roles and practices in archaeology ( Huvila, 2006 , 2010 ) as well as certain practices within the ongoing ARKDIS project (ARKDIS). Another empirical perspective is the research on usability and requirements for software design for humanities researchers which was investigated within the VERA project ( Fisher et al. , 2009 ; Warwick, 2012 ) as well as by Given and Willson ( Given and Willson, 2015 ) for scholars in the UK and Canada.

What are conclusions for our research? Since a joint object of research in (visual) digital humanities is cultural heritage in terms of images and artefacts, there are various sub-communities related to original disciplines, specific technologies, or dedication to education, history studies or preservation of artefacts. Despite various differences, joint attributes are project orientation, cross-disciplinary cooperation and dependency on technologies and data. Since there are various studies on disciplinary cultures in the visual oriented branches of digital humanities, research often focuses on specific communities such as digital art history or archaeology. In addition to the already named objectives for our empirical investigation, we will highlight the communalities and differences beyond links to both visual methods and digital humanities.

Research started with a series of questionnaire-based surveys on research methodologies and topics, held at the International Forum for Knowledge Asset Management (IFKAD) 12 during a session on visual communication management, as well as done during the Archaeological Information in the Digital Society (ARKDIS) conference 13 which focused on topics of information in archaeology ( Münster and Niebling, 2016 ; Münster, 2016a ). Finally, another survey was carried out during a guest lecture on digital 3D reconstruction held at City University in London in October 2016 involving an audience specialized in human–computer interaction. The paper-based survey to be filled out during the workshop contained four open questions—(1) for the interviewee’s field of research, for (2) relevant ‘gold’ standards and (3) most important publications as well as for (4) suggestions for methods and approaches to be included in a knowledge repository. In total, 44 researchers participated (cf. Table 1 ) – with disciplinary backgrounds primarily in computing and archaeology as well as on different – primarily post-graduate or professorial levels - of academic career.

Questionnaire-based surveys

Since these podia dealt with particular aspects only, they were merely employed to gain a general overview on research topics and standards of relevance.

To investigate research topics and methods, researchers, and a scholarly culture in the field of visual digital humanities in more detail, we interviewed researchers at University College London, City University and the University of London between September and November 2016. Although based in England, there were many international scholars represented in this sample.

3.1 Sampling

The sample was compiled by using a ‘pragmatic’ theoretical sampling ( Strauss and Corbin, 1996 )—due to a limited number of potential contributors and by practical aspects as for instance their availability. A first cohort was constructed to gain a wide overview on the topic (cf. Table 2 ). Guiding principles were to represent a wide scope in original disciplines, fields of application, and positions.

Interviews included in this study

To closely investigate research interests and the influence of disciplinary backgrounds in particular, which had been identified as important factor beforehand, we interviewed a second cohort especially focused on people closely linked to research—e.g. by managing or performing research projects linked to visual methods.

A third cohort of interviews was dedicated to closer investigate several ad hoc hypothesis—e.g. the relation between visual digital humanities and other disciplines. According to the theoretical sampling principles, such multi-cohort design allows to investigate potential factors and micro-hypothesis in more detail than by employing a single cohort design (cf. Strauss and Corbin, 1996 ). In total, 15 interviews were carried out—7 in the first, 4 in the second and another 4 in the third cohort.

3.2 Data collection

For an investigation of complex and non-trivial processes, mainly guideline-based expert interviews are suitable ( Mieg and Näf, 2005 ; Gläser and Laudel, 2009 ). These forms provide—compared to e.g. questionnaires—a less structured qualitative toolset, combining a set of anchor questions with the freedom to follow up points as necessary ( Thomas, 2009 , p. 164; Zina, 2010 , p. 195). Each interview lasted between 10 and 60 minutes. All interviews were recorded and semi-automatically transcribed by using the Pop Up Archive service in a non-public way (2016). All interview data were anonymized for further analysis.

3.3 Data analysis

Data analysis was undertaken using approaches of qualitative content analysis ( Mayring, 2008 ) to (1) inductively gain an initial category scheme and (2) deduce it to further materials. This resulted in both an inductively generated categorization scheme as well as a set of related variables and occurrences.

3.4 Limitations

Since this is an interpretative and explorative study (cf. Bhattacherjee, 2012 ) a general limitation is that it neither test hypothesis nor deliver quantifiable results in terms of exact measures. Moreover, potential weaknesses and limitations are caused by a potentially flaw sample—e.g. since the focus is on researchers based in London—and the qualitative and therefore maybe biased evaluation paradigm.

4.1 Visual digital humanities scholars

What are the disciplinary backgrounds of scholars in visual humanities? All queried persons started their academic education in an adjacent discipline but not in digital humanities itself. 14 With regards to their formal graduation, interviewed scholars primarily have humanities or technical backgrounds—in two cases both ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016b ; PhD student in Geosciences, 2016 ). Related humanities disciplines are archaeology, architectural history, medieval history, classics, information, and literature studies ( PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 ; PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , lines 5–7; Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 17, Digital Humanities Coordinator; 2016, line 51). As background in engineering, primarily computing was named ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 25; PostDoc in information technologies, 2016 , Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 15), further geosciences ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 23) as well as architecture and cultural heritage conservation ( Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 ). Another researcher holds degrees in both archaeology and cultural heritage management ( PostDoc in Digital Humanities, 2016 ). A resultant hypothesis would be that visual digital humanities researchers have a wide scope of academic backgrounds primarily in technical disciplines or the humanities, but often have a history of interdisciplinarity.

Reasons given for entering the field of visual digital humanities varied. The majority of interviewees mentioned that their motivation to enter the field of digital humanities was widely driven by personal research interests requiring complementary skills. Where these interests were coming from:

… another application area: With regards to a relation between academic origin and interest, in most cases research interests are grounded in researcher’s original discipline, e.g. a computing engineer ‘got into the habit of applying my computer graphics toolbox’ to cultural heritage objects ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , lines 36–37). Vice versa another researcher argued to ‘bringing the humanities skills to bear on the question of digital technology’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 , line 48).

Curiosity: In contrast, a cultural heritage management scholar did her PhD in digital humanities while wanting to know about a certain topic from a meta-perspective, in particular to ‘better understand and find the patterns and themes in the behaviour of scholars’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a , line 11).

Professional needs: Another motivation was driven by professional needs, in case of a researcher who works in an urban planning interest group ‘[the use of GIS] was the only way that I saw that multiple audiences could actually extract information’ ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 15).

In contrast, four researchers who entered the field of digital humanities as computing engineers figured out that their entrance in digital humanities took place via employment in a project ( Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 15; PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 , line 18; PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016b , line 31; Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 19). That leads to the hypothesis that especially for humanities researchers, the motivation to enter the field of visual digital humanities is widely driven by research interests, and using appropriate methods to answer research questions. This corresponds with studies about students’ epistemological belief. According to Paulsens and Wells investigation from 1998 students from humanities are more deeply reflecting about knowledge (… and research practices) as well as being willing to learning about non-familiar topics than in applied disciplines as engineering ( Paulsen and Wells, 1998 ; Paulsen and Feldman, 2005 ).

Similarly, How do individuals learn visual digital humanities methods?

As a closely linked question, how do scholars in the field of visual digital humanities acquire knowledge in complementary areas?

Studying courses in the complementary discipline: In one single case the researcher ‘did the masters [course] of the advanced visualization and analysis […] which is the hardest thing I've ever done. Lot of maths. I don't come from a math background […]. I just sit and look at equations and think this is so exciting […]’ ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 23–25).

Self-driven learning by learning using materials: Primarily humanities researchers who went into coding mentioned that a use of learning materials was their primary resource. This comprises for example online tutorials, 15 web resources and books. 16

Learning by experience: Remarkably, it was mainly engineers who said that they did not specifically study humanities topics, but got familiar with this content by cooperating with humanities scholars. Nevertheless, they would estimate their level of expertise in humanities as merely basic. 17

It is interesting that primarily scholars with an original background in the humanities claim to acquire digital skills by doing courses or tutorials. Also from a coordination perspective, current attempts focus on a training of humanities scholars to ‘improve the digital skills’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , line 7). A general enhancement of digital competencies in humanities is underlined by another estimation of a researcher on information practices in art history: ‘[Younger] art historians being more reluctant to employ new technologies’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a , line 15). An adjacent question would be whether, vice versa, ‘technologists would have to learn humanities skills? With regards to a formal teaching program in digital humanities, […] very, very few [students] […] have a technical background’ ( Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 113). Similarly, all interviewees originating from a technical discipline stated that their experience came from practising in digital humanities, 18 even if they estimate their level of expertise in humanities issues as limited. 19

Important prerequisites for digital visual humanities are not to have a specific disciplinary background ( Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 111–113), but to have good maths and coding skills—which was named by three of the interviewees ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 149; PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 23; Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 73). A critical comment was made about the depth of acquired skills: ‘We have lots of projects where we have people that say databases or thinking about text mining but not knowing how to do it’ ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 17–19). Resultant hypotheses are that important skills for employing visual digital humanities methods are maths and coding. Primarily humanists entering the field of visual digital humanities have to acquire additional skills in maths and coding areas.

Since currently many university level programs in digital humanities are offered, esp. at masters level (cf. Duwe and Meffert, 2008 ; Sahle, 2013 ), it was interesting to note that none of the interviewees claimed to have graduated in these programs. An explanation offered by one of the interviewees is that specific digital (visual) humanities study programs have only been offered within the last 10 years ( Professor in Information Studies, 2016 , line 17), and graduates will rarely be found as active members of a scholarly community yet, due to ‘the very long pipeline’ from studying to academic establishment. 20 With regards to a comparable situation in computer graphics, another interviewee figured out that ‘people of my generation […] had their supervisors who themselves were electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, architects, mathematicians, physicists’ and brought their scholars primarily in these communities ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 77–79).

4.2 Fields of research, topics, and methods

4.2.1 fields of research.

Another interest of this article was to identify research topics in the field of visual digital humanities. With regards to surveys undertaken during the ARKDIS conference as a conference in particular on information in the archaeology (cf. Table 3 ), less surprisingly a majority of researchers work on topics of data management and acquisition—including aspects like data retrieval, data processing, data indexing, and data storage. Other areas of importance are data visualization as well as communication—especially with regards to crowd involvement and participation via crowdsourcing. A use of digital humanities methods for data analysis and a—not further specified—research on methods were mentioned in four cases.

‘What are your fields of research related to archaeological information/visual humanities?’ (Questionnaire based survey carried out at ARKDIS conference, 23 contributors, 76 answers)

With regards to the findings from the interviews, some more detailed information on research methodologies was provided. Research approaches can be distinguished as:

User behaviour studies: The investigation of the information behaviour of researchers as well as the development of supporting technologies were named by four interviewees. A thematic scope comprises the investigation of image related information management by humanities scholars ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a ) as well as by professional image users as for example journalists ( Senior Lecturer in information technologies, 2016 ) and user interaction with interfaces ( Professor in Computing, 2016 ; Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 ; Senior Lecturer in information technologies, 2016 ).

Data analysis as pattern extraction from data and their investigation was in focus of four researchers, too. One research project dealt with an extraction of metadata from archaeological excavation reports by using language processing tools ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016b ). A similar approach done by another researcher was for the abstraction of dance movements from video material via structure from motion (SFM) ( PostDoc in information technologies, 2016 ). A third researcher investigated change patterns of urban housing during time from GIS data ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 ).

Data acquisition and spatial modelling in terms of digitization of analogue sources was mentioned by two researchers in context of 3D content creation primarily by photogrammetric and laser-based acquisition of physical cultural heritage sites and objects ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 27; Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 27).

Crowd participation is a topic in three research tasks. An example is the development of platforms for crowd participation.

Visualization: Two researchers mentioned 3D printing as well as computer graphic approaches, whereby there is an interest for both the development of intuitive human computer interaction metaphors and algorithms.

Interfaces: Two researchers deal with topics of user communication. Two researchers build digital applications and interfaces to access visual data from image collections ( Senior Lecturer in information technologies, 2016 ) and 3D models derived from objects in museum collections ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ). Related research interests are for user experience and interface design.

This contrasts to the findings of Eichmann et al. (2016 ) concerning keywords of the ADHO Digital Humanities conference series, whereas analysis—namely text and data mining—are ranked first, followed by ‘Literature studies’ and ‘Archives, Repositories, Sustainability And Preservation’. Therefore, it may be questioned, whether particularly analysis is a less relevant or more diverse topic in the visual-oriented digital humanities than in the textual-oriented field.

4.2.2 Hot topics

In addition to the question of ‘personal’ topics, another interest was to examine current ‘hot’ topics in the field of visual digital humanities. Corresponding to previous investigations on the particular field of digital 3D modelling ( Münster, 2017a ), a scientific discourse is widely driven by technological trends.

4.2.2.1 Big data

Consequently, one of the current hot topics—mentioned by three interviewees—also in visual digital humanities is Big data in terms of ‘large volume[s]’ as terabytes and beyond ‘of objects to process’ ( Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 47). Since big data-based research adds opportunities such as the processing of large cohorts of information without reduction, it also adds ‘some massive challenges’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 97) in terms of efficient algorithms, and high ‘[…] computer power, bandwidth [and] storage’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 99) requirements have to be mentioned here.

4.2.2.2 Virtual and augmented reality

As mentioned by two researchers, virtual and augmented reality visualizations are popular in visual digital humanities, too, and are primarily used to present 3D scaled cultural heritage content ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 159).

4.2.2.3 Pattern recognition

The recognition of patterns especially not only by machine-learning approaches, but also with regards to appropriate interfaces to support human vision of large scale information, is another ‘hot topic’ and was named by two of the interviewees. Even if the potentials of machine learning for humanities research are undoubted, for instance to automatically classify manuscripts ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , lines 49–51), they ‘might not be an easy sell because […] trying to replicate [researchers work by computers may be seen] […] pretentious if not even heresy [by humanities scholars]’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 10).

4.2.2.4 User engagement

Various approaches to user engagement were named as ongoing topics by four interviewees in total. A list of mentioned topics also reflects current hot topics and comprises digital storytelling ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , lines 10–11), especially for museum education, as well as citizen science and crowdsourcing to classify, enrich, or assess large-scale amounts of digital content. Moreover, aspects of ‘openness’ and sharing of content are in focus—for instance, for 3D digitized artefacts ( Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 47).

4.2.3 Research methods

Since research methods in digital humanities obviously incorporate both technical and humanities perspectives, our interest was to investigate which methods are applied by individual scholars. Generally, visual digital humanities are marked by a big ‘diversity of topics and methods [as well as] […] different practices and […] different approaches’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a , line 31). On a general level, three different sets of methods could be identified:

The ‘humanities’ method set primarily focuses on the investigation of research questions by interpretation (cf. Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , lines 33–35). In digital humanities project, this mainly comprises the skills to frame relevant research questions and to ‘evaluate a variety of different sources’ ( Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 49).

The ‘engineering’ method set comprises various approaches to ‘synthesize new things […] and then [to] analyse them’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 65). Research ‘method’ is primarily to conceptualize, build and evaluate prototypes ( Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 27).

The social sciences method set: Numerous scholars employed methods deriving from empirical social sciences for their research. That comprises quantitative and qualitative approaches like interviews ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 ; PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a ) and surveys ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ) as well as observation e.g. of user behaviour ( Senior Lecturer in information technologies, 2016 ; Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 ).

How are these set of methods employed in digital humanities research projects? With regards to our interviews, we identified three prototypic modes to combine these method sets:

Cross-disciplinary research teams: In most digital humanities projects, different method sets are employed by different research team members—for instance, humanists, who determine a research interest, select sources and interpret results, while engineers develop and test a software application. Against that background, research methods are primarily adopted from the disciplines the scholars originally graduated in. Moreover, these researchers primarily participate in scientific communities in their original disciplines or involve perspectives from their original disciplines into cross-disciplinary publications.

Digitally enhanced research : As stated in the previous paragraph, it is mainly researchers from the humanities who acquire computing skills to foster their research interest in the humanities. Even if they partly achieve excellent practical skills, 21 their fields of research excellence are still related to their original scientific disciplines.

Mixed-methods researchers: A relatively small number of scholars—three in our sample—base their research on methods from various disciplinary spheres and received scientific merits in multiple disciplines. In our sample, these approaches are practised exclusively by people with degrees in two disciplinary spheres—e.g. humanities and engineering ( Professor in Digital Humanities, 2016 ; PhD student in geosciences, 2016 ) or humanities and social sciences ( PostDoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016a ).

This finding may contrast to the finding of Given and Willson for textual-oriented digital humanities, where tool development became an essential skill for researchers ( Given and Willson, 2018 ).

4.3 Visual digital humanities and their culture

4.3.1 a practice-grounded definition.

With regards to definitions retrieved from the interviewees, digital humanities as the umbrella of visual digital humanities are characterized by the use of computational processes to investigate the culture of the past ( Professor in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 125) from a humanities’ point of view ( Professor in Information Studies, 2016 , line 41). It is characterized by ‘interdisciplinary team[work] […] but also moves towards openness and sharing’ ( Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, 2016 , lines 89–91). Moreover, digital humanities are ‘around the subject’ ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 22) in terms of comprising a wide scope of methods and approaches as well as being practice oriented.

4.3.1.1 A state of establishment

Digital humanities are still widely seen as ‘emerging’ as they ‘have to […] establish [their own] research philosophy, […] research methodology and […] learn from […] other disciplines’ ( Professor in Information Studies, 2016 , line 19). Against that background, interviewees distinguish between a state of maturity in terms of involved researchers and in terms of organizational development. With regards to that first aspect, one of the interviewees argued that the zenith of digital humanities is over now and ‘a certain point […]when there's enough teaching programs, […] enough people involved in the society […]’ ( Professor in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 149) has been reached. From an organizational perspective, several researchers argued that it takes ‘a very long time, [sometimes] […] two generations of scholar[s]’ ( Professor in Information Studies, 2016 , line 19) to establish a novel academic discipline. A prediction of the future role of digital humanities widely varies. While ‘some interviewees would see digital humanities as an academic discipline in future, others expect a massive impact on humanities, which changes […] the nature of humanities’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 , lines 73–74). This discussion reflects findings in other research, whereas the question for current state of establishment differs ( Nyhan and Flinn, 2016 )

4.3.1.2 Small communities

Even if most interviewees agreed in being part of a digital humanities community they are often not active members there, but in smaller sub-communities on specific topics like urban history geomatics ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 ) or web archivism ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 ). These sub-communities are characterized by ‘[…] not a lot people in it’ ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 27). Since it is ‘[…] very hard to find people who are actually interested in [for instance] the big picture of a city […]’ ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 21), it sets the necessity for intensive cross-national exchange. A resultant hypothesis is that visual digital humanities subsume various smaller scientific communities.

4.3.2 Cooperation cultures

4.3.2.1 cross-national cooperation cultures.

Maybe for these reasons of specialist small communities, Digital Humanists estimate themselves as internationally well linked. With regards to academic excellence, visual digital humanities are led by researchers in the USA where that field has ‘really far more [importance] than it has in the UK’ ( PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 , lines 73–74). From the perspective of London universities, there are close ties especially not only to American institutions but also to various European countries in terms of joint projects and conferences. For instance, one museum researcher mentioned that some of their research was funded by a private US foundation ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ). With regards to the internationality of staff and students, four of the interviewees in London were not originally British but emigrated from other European countries. In contrast, a large number of students in digital humanities courses are not English originally within that population, the biggest group of around ‘twenty [to] twenty five percent is Chinese’ ( Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 199), which leads to the hypothesis that scholars in visual digital humanities are internationally well linked.

4.3.2.2 Private–public partnership

Another finding was that occasionally commercial partners got involved in research projects, too. While museum projects, in particular, get wide support by companies, 22 a private–public partnership in academic projects was described as difficult due to the expectations of the commercial partners as well as problems with institutional funders in case of mixed funding. 23

4.3.2.3 Cross-disciplinary cooperation cultures

Cooperation between different disciplines is one of the most evident attributes of visual digital humanities. Against this background, interviewees pointed out several aspects which complicate collaborations.

4.3.2.4 Problem versus question-oriented research

Visual digital humanities ‘require[s] engineers and humanities scholars to directly engage with each other […]’ ‘to produce […] more meaningful outcomes […]’. As ‘engineers we’re always looking for problems to solve’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 39) while a representative of the humanities is highly question-oriented, so ‘it's a very different perspective […]’ between these both approaches ( PostDoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 , line 69).

4.3.2.5 Single versus team-based research

While engineering disciplines and in particular computer sciences as relatively young areas tend to perform their work in interdisciplinary and team settings, traditional humanities research was performed by solitary researchers (cf. De Solla Price, 1963 ).

4.3.2.6 Fuzzy versus static

‘I sometimes feel that brings us closer to the humanities than let’s say a purely sound scientific approach because in the humanities as well there is always room for synthesis. You’re always allowed to […] put something out there to come up with a hypothesis to and then see what happens. When we build systems we have to live with it’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , lines 85–87).

4.3.4.7 A clash of cultures

As a consequence, a cooperation quality highly depends on:

mutual respect : ‘require engineers and humanities scholars to directly engage with each other you know develop an appreciation of each other's approaches before something can come out of that’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 109). Opposite: ‘I'll criticize engineering for coming on to a problem and thinking they can solve it. Humanities is easy ( Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 51).

understanding of mutual benefits : ‘I might be able to help answer those questions but I don't know what the fundamental questions are in a particular field. And that's where the collaborative is necessary’ ( Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 41–43). ‘And as engineers we're pretty good at finding […] a good sweet spot in terms of system design [as problem solving]’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 45). As a consequence, a basic task is to highlight mutual benefits, since for instance humanities researchers ‘[…] very often […] don't know yet what they want this morning teasing out and trying to find some sort of a series of questions […] [to identify how] […] they going to use […] [digital methods]’ ( Research Associate in Remote sensing, 2016 , line 30).

common ground of understanding: ‘I find that usually how people speak to each other varies by disciplines and very often I need to translate […] between disciplines’ ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 16).

These findings widely correspond to our previous investigations, e.g. in the field of Digital Heritage (cf. Münster, 2016b ). In comparison to general problems named for interdisciplinary research, both Digital Humanities Digital Heritage seem well established. Both already have specific publications bodies, so for instance the problem of a lack of appropriate publication venues, which often hinders interdisciplinary research (cf. Wessner and Kienle, 2007 ) may not apply here.

4.4 Standards and challenges

4.4.1 standards.

What are people defining as standards in the field of visual digital humanities? During a workshop held at the ARKDIS conference in 2016 people were asked to name ‘gold standards’ in terms of most relevant items (cf. Table 4 ). Even if the conference audience may represent a particular community on information studies in archaeology, some interesting findings could be retrieved.

‘What are “gold standards” in your field of research?’ (Questionnaire-based survey carried out at ARKDIS conference, 21 contributors, 56 answers)

While both publications and projects were named manually in the questionnaire as anchor examples, it was remarkable that various data repositories and services were named as ‘standards’, which underlines the high relevance of data as well as the availability of high-quality infrastructure suppliers. Moreover, ‘methods’—even if named as anchor example—were named only occasional. A resultant hypothesis is that standards in visual digital humanities are primarily defined by publication bodies, technologies, projects, and repositories. An explanation may be that Digital Heritage is—as mentioned by a head of digital museum technologies—‘around the subject’—incorporating a wide plurality of contributing institutions as well as methods and approaches.

4.4.2 Current issues in digital humanities

4.4.2.1 data accessibility.

A majority of interviewees estimate the access to data as the ‘biggest challenge’ of digital humanities (eg. PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , lines 119–23). That includes for instance aspects of data availability which is limited by legal barriers or company ownership. Since ‘much data is being shared by services like Facebook’, it is ‘[potentially] going to be locked away and inaccessible’ for researchers ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , line 73). Moreover, with regards to aspects of long term preservation and availability ‘we can’t rely on commercial companies to pay for this’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , lines 73–76). Various governmental initiatives demand to make data created by public institutions available for everyone to equal conditions. That makes it impossible for museums to contribute to research projects without making their digital assets fully available for commercial exploitation ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 , line 20).

Beside the vast data not available online for various reasons, much data is currently not properly accessible due to insufficient tagging, indexing or linking (cf. e.g. Rimmer et al. , 2008 ; Friedrichs et al. , 2018 ). As a consequence, ‘we don’t really know what’s in there, if […] web page [links to] […] broken images’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , lines 25–27). Finally, this relates to the question how to archive and preserve complex digital data as for example ‘digital art’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , Line 115).

4.4.2.2 Legal issues of research software

Just as legal issues may hinder access to data, another challenging aspect is seen in the non-transparency and restrictions of commercial research software. This causes problems in making research outcomes fully transparent, and funding and institutional affiliation is required to be able to use research tools. 24

4.4.2.3 Increasing complexity of research

Another challenge is seen in the increasing complexity of research approaches in (visual) digital humanities. As stated by a professor in information technologies, recommendations for software programming in humanities tend to be ‘much more complex than [in] other discipline[s]’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 45). While humanities disciplines like image history or linguistics traditionally focus on specific media types, there is a current trend to investigate research issues by taking various material into account—‘visual material as well as the text[s]’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , line 27). As a consequence, occasionally novel cross-disciplinary academic units appear which are dedicated to a specific issue such ‘as the science of cities’ ( PhD student in geosciences, 2016 , line 179).

Finally, against the background of a currently primarily tool oriented academic discourse on visual digital humanities, it is seen as a big challenge there to develop ‘not just the tools but theoretical frameworks for all of them’ ( Digital Humanities Coordinator, 2016 , line 57).

5.1 Visual digital humanities researchers

What are lessons learned from this research? Scholars in visual digital humanities derive from many subject areas: in our investigation especially engineering, humanities, and social or informational studies. Only one of the interviewees originally graduated in digital humanities. With regards to the mentioned long duration of becoming established in academia and vice versa, the currently short history of native digital humanities courses and graduations—which only became available in the early 2000s—it would be a prospective task to monitor how this situation, and the academic trajectory of those in the digital humanities field, develops in future.

5.2 A wide scope of topics, approaches, and methods

While there is a wide scope of topics addressed, data access seems to be the most crucial point. Both data acquisition and management are the most prominent research areas. Topics are widely influenced by current trends in technology and society, which may be caused by the opportunities to pitch for funding for projects by referring to up-to-date issues. Moreover, visual digital humanities topics are not merely a movement to ‘redefine traditional humanities scholarship through digital means’ ( Adams and Gunn, 2013 ). Beside the ‘technology-enabled’ use of computational technologies to answer new types of research questions and the ‘technology-facilitated’ employment of computational technologies as medium ‘for new research practices without necessarily transforming researchers’ methods’ ( Long and Schonfeld, 2014 , p. 42), a third type of research approach became apparent: ‘humanities-enabled’ research as trading in humanities techniques to answer technology related questions like user-engagement, research ethics, or to perform a comprehensive explanation of technical results. Moreover, a disciplinary identity of visual digital humanities is primarily defined by publication bodies, repositories, and projects. In contrast, there are probably neither single institutions nor methods explicitly mentioned as standard—maybe due to the ‘diverse nature of the methods used in art history’ ( Long and Schonfeld, 2014 , p. 48).

5.3 Visual digital humanities and their culture

5.3.1 visual digital humanities as cross-disciplinary work.

A key aspect of visual digital humanities is cross-disciplinary cooperation. Even if many researchers argue that digital humanities are (… or should be …) a ‘Two-Way Street’ (e.g. Flis et al. , 2016 ), it occurs in practice often as an adoption of digital skills by humanities scholars or as cross-operational projects. In contrast, a wider adoption of humanities skills by engineers rarely takes place. Are digital humanities projects for engineers just ‘another field of application’ ( Münster, 2016b , p. 357)? Even if engineers would estimate their research as topic independent ‘problem solving’, original research challenges in digital humanities are caused by the high complexity of questions ( Professor in Computing, 2016 , line 45) and the fuzziness of humanities research. Some principles to foster that cooperation may be seen in mutual respect, the understanding of mutual benefits and the development of a common ground of understanding—in terms of a shared terminology but also as a moderation of interests. Since experience is a most crucial factor in managing cross-disciplinarity, ‘established digital humanities research centers, and some academic libraries collaborating with such centers’ may fertilize that ( Beland, 2016 ).

5.3.2 Digital humanities as Mode 2 research

Digital humanities could be seen as a mode 2 research with an emphasis on cross-disciplinary teamwork, the use of machines and a joint intellectual property ( Professor in Computing, 2016 ). 25 Since a disciplinary culture on that type of research is widely common in engineering but less in humanities 26 that may explain why humanities scholars report the need to qualify to enter the field of digital humanities much more than engineers.

5.3.3 Are digital humanities still an emerging field of research?

With special regards to art history, Zorich stated various discipline related barriers ( Zorich, 2012 , p. 19): a conservative disciplinary culture, ‘outmoded reward and evaluation systems’ which do not reward digital work and the ‘belief that print is the only valid form of publication’. According to Long and Schonfeld, ‘at present, though, new digital methods are still seen as risky and experimental. Even where there are excellent support services for art historians who want to apply digital methods, only a minority of art historians […] are interested in using these methods’ ( Long and Schonfeld, 2014 , p. 43). While for digital humanities in general further progress is currently not undoubted, visual digital humanities would still have the potential to evolve.

What is next in visual digital humanities? As there is an established scholarly community of researchers who work on a broad scope of topics, there are numerous established conference series and journals dealing with topics of visual digital humanities, in particular with focus on digital cultural heritage ( Münster, 2017b ). Furthermore, there are specific funding programs around topics of digital heritage and digital humanities, some first obstacles for further institutionalization have already been mastered. During our investigation we examined numerous hypotheses to be tested in further studies:

Visual digital humanities scholars’ academic backgrounds are primarily in technical disciplines or humanities.

Especially for humanities researchers, the motivation to enter the field of digital humanities is widely driven by interests.

Important skills for visual digital humanities are maths and coding.

Primarily, humanists entering the field of visual digital humanities have to acquire additional skills.

The current generation of visual digital humanities scholars have seldom originally graduated in digital humanities—yet.

Scholars practice research in the fields they have originally graduated in.

Visual digital humanities subsume various smaller scientific communities.

Scholars in visual digital humanities are internationally well linked.

Standards in visual digital humanities are primarily defined by publication bodies, technologies, projects, and repositories.

With regards to recent organizational development, e.g. of eLearning (cf. Euler and Seufert, 2005 ), future important steps on the way to institutionalization of (visual) digital humanities as an academic field or discipline will be the development of specific methods, institutions, and curricula. While the text-oriented branches of digital humanities have stepped into that stage a decade ago, it is currently ongoing for visually oriented fields with some first professorships on digital heritage methods or digital art history. As the work of visual digital humanities is primarily set around tools ( Ballon and Westermann, 2006 ) and their practical application, the question for a sufficient level of ‘distinct/inherent’ methods as well as scientificity is still pending. In archaeology, an alternative way of establishment of digital methods may be visible nowadays—where digital tools are part of the methodical repertoire of the entire discipline. Due to the conservative culture of other disciplines as art history we are in doubt if an adoption there will take place in a similar way. Against that background, our approach to subsume visually oriented branches of digital humanities may be fruitful since similar topics are addressed, the same technologies are used and discussed, as well as similar challenges—cross-disciplinarity and data—being faced. However, we cannot predict if future developments of digital cultures in these visual disciplines will progress in the same direction.

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (no. 01UG1630) as well as by a travel grant provided by the TU Dresden.

We would like to thank Sun Ying for pointing out some aspects of methodology, and Christina Kamposiori, Kristina Friedrichs, and Gerit Rother for their important remarks on content and language.

Art History investigates many of the objects that Cultural Heritage deals with, mainly works of art from the late antiquity to modern age, see Dilly (1979) . While these objects themselves are tangible, Art History is also concerned with all tangible and intangible aspects connected with the work which provide insights about their origin and meaning ( Locher, 2010 ). This provokes various interdisciplinary contacts and—in the context of digital visual humanities applications – especially temporal overlaps with objects of archaeology. Methods for investigating genetic and morphologic connections are covered by analyzing style ( Seippel, 1989 ; Suckale 2001 ). Another important range of methods is concerned with the meaning of the works of art (iconography) and systems of meaning (iconology) ( Seippel, 1989 ). For a more extended glance on methodology in art history, see Pächt (1986) . Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis / ausgewählte Schriften , München, Prestel.

Museology focuses on the presentation of research findings and reconstructions with the help of visualizations in museums in combination with didactically enhanced applications ( Carrozzino and Bergamasco, 2010 ).

Archaeology investigates tangible remains and evidence of human culture ( Renfrew and Bahn, 2005 ). Archaeology. The Key Concepts , New York, Routledge in order to generate a realistic representation of what exists now, and closely approximate what may have once been ( Rua and Alvito, 2011 ). Often, the physical preservation of the objects is not intended. Therefore, a thorough documentation and data collection is even more crucial. Surveying techniques, especially laser scanning ( Christofori and Bierwagen, 2013 ; Clini et al., 2013 ; Lasaponara et al. , 2011 ) and image processing ( Brutto and Meli, 2012 ; Martin-Beaumont et al. , 2013 ), as well as photos and plans, are used to document excavations in detail and provide sufficient data for a 3D reconstruction of objects.

The term Cultural Heritage refers, as a meta-science, to a wider scientific field which addresses multiple sciences and disciplines adopting their methods. Cultural Heritage, being tangible or intangible, provides the common subject to link the different approaches. On difficulties concerning the classification and transdisciplinary of Digital Heritage as an ‘Agora’, which may also be assigned to Cultural Heritage, see Ch'ng et al. (2013) .

While the term ‘visual humanities’ is only rarely used in literature, there are currently only few other definitions available. According to Drucker, visual humanities deal with a ‘sophisticated information and interface design [that] treats the same people as subjects with advanced cognitive and interpretative abilities, where [they may respond quite differently, engaging much more deeply with the materials on offer […].’ Citation according to Sattler (2014) . The Association for Digital Humanities in Estonia defines a scope of visual digital humanities primarily against the background of ‘Representing and interpreting [non-textual] Humanities Data’. Digital Humanities in Estonia (2016) , which for instance includes aspects of data organization and computational analysis.

Based on: Heusinger (1989) . Particularly cited according to: Bentkowska-Kafel (2013) . Moreover, a scope of media and applications in digital humanities and in particular digital art history is presented in: Bentkowska-Kafel (2006) .

There are various alternative classification schemes available for visually supported research and visualization in the humanities. In context of electronic visualization in arts and culture, George Mallen defines ‘technology and culture’ concerns ‘with images, movement and interactions, in the sense of performances’ as key interests ( Bowen et al. , 2013 ). Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture , London, Springer. According to Heusinger, computers support the work in art history, and, in a wider scope, in visual humanities concerning aspects of data collection (e.g. through digitization), data retrieval from database records with the transfer of knowledge, examining visual humanities questions (e.g. a composition of complex figurative paintings), reconstructing, simulating, and producing objects; and administering and organizing people and objects ( Heusinger, 1989 ; Bentkowska-Kafel, 2013 ). An alternative classification approach for digital art history is to differentiate between addressed media and applications ( Bentkowska-Kafel et al. , 2006 ).

TEI stands for the Text Encoding Initiative, a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. See: http://www.tei-c.org

http://www.adho.org

By definition, disciplines are characterized by common methods and theories and have similar ‘reference systems, disciplinary ways of thinking, quality criteria, publication habits and bodies’ as well as a similar institutionalization ( Schophaus et al. , 2003 ). Likewise, Knorr-Cetina thought that each discipline has its own ‘Epistemic Culture’ in the sense of different ‘architectures of empirical approaches, specific constructions of the referent, particular ontologies of instruments, and different social machines’ ( Knorr-Cetina, 1999 ).

As an example, ‘Spatial Humanities’ denotes the adoption of ‘geographic concepts of space to the humanities’ ( Bodenhamer et al. , 2010b ). The Spatial Humanities. GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship , Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

IFKAD 2016 took place in Dresden, Germany, 15th to 17th June, https://tu-dresden.de/bu/architektur/cka/die-professur/news/ifkad-international-forum-on-knowledge-asset-dynamics .

ARKDIS took place in Uppsala, Sweden, June 30–July 2, 2016, http://arkdis-project.blogspot.pt/p/conference.html .

‘[…] the majority [of Digital (Visual) Humanities scholars] haven't come from that direction [originally] […] Research Administrator in Digital Humanities (2016) . Interview #8 . A less comprehensive predecessor of digital humanities studies may be seen in“[master] program[s] […] delivered jointly by the school of computing in the school of humanities’, mentioned by one of the interviewees as prominent during the 2000’s to educate technical and humanities skills ( Postdoc Researcher in Digital Humanities, 2016b ; Interview #10 ).

‘I think people can learn very easily from things like Codecademy [as web-based tutorial platform]’ ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ; Interview #4 ).

‘I got several books of web development and I taught myself […]’ ( Postdoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 ; Interview #9 ).

‘I suppose [to have worked in the field of] language and linguistics […] the longest, but I wouldn't say I was an expert in that field’ ( Research Administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 ; Interview #8 ).

For example: ‘It was just a case of being in that space for that length of time working [in a Humanities] department, that I joined and very quickly to sort of the kinds of questions that are asked in the humanities’ ( Research administrator in Digital Humanities, 2016 , line 29).

‘[…] drive the new questions in the humanities […] would be my weakest part’ ( Research administrator in Digital Humanities 2016 , line 41).

‘[…] it will be a small number [of researchers originally studied Digital (Visual) Humanities] because it's a new discipline […]. And so it's a very long pipeline [from studying to becoming active part in research community]’ Professor in Information Studies ( Professor in Information Studies, 2016 ; Interview #13 ).

As an example: Two scholars with academic backgrounds in the humanities are employed in engineering positions now ( Postdoc Researcher in Spatial Humanities, 2016 ; Interview #9 ; Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ; Interview #4 ).

For example, Sketchfab [a commercial company—S.M.] got involved as technology supplier in a museum project ( Head of Information Technologies in Museum, 2016 ; Interview #4 ).

‘But there are a lot […] of forms [to] fill in […] in any [proposal]. […] I've no idea […] how that really […] operates particularly with the commercial sector. Moreover: In cooperation with commercial companies “[…] I have to give you something back. I'm not going to get it for the good of the country”’ ( Phd Student in Geosciences, 2016 ; Interview #5 ).

‘[Without funding] I couldn't have the mapping [software] license’ ( PhD student in geosciences 2016 ).

The concept of mode 2 research was originally named by Gibbons et al. in 1994 (c.f. Nowotny et al. , 2003 ; Hessels and Lente, 2007 ). Some of the attributes named here were initially reported by: De Solla Price (1963) . Little Science - Big Science , New York, Columbia Univ. Press

One of the interviewees figured out that for PhD students in Humanities ‘in the end it's their own personal journey’ ( Professor in Computing, 2016 ; Interview #2 ). The ‘solo’ scholarship got reflected in several studies about humanities research ( Given and Willson, 2018 ; Toms and O’brien, 2008 ).

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