Digital Humanities - A Discipline in its Own Right? An Analysis of the Role and Position of DH in the Academic Landscape

Although digital humanities (DH) has received a lot of attention in recent years, its status as "a discipline in its own right" (Schreibman et al., 2004) and its position in the overall academic landscape are still being negotiated. While there are countless essays and opinion pieces that debate the status of DH, little research has been dedicated to exploring the field in a systematic and empirical way (Poole, 2017). This study aims to contribute to the existing research gap by comparing articles published over the past three decades in three established English-language DH journals (Computers and the Humanities, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Digital Humanities Quarterly) with research articles from journals in fifteen other academic disciplines (corpus size: 34,041 articles; 299 million tokens). As a method of analysis, we use LDA topic modeling, combined with recent approaches that aggregate topic models by means of hierarchical agglomerative clustering. Our findings indicate that DH is simultaneously a discipline in its own right and a highly interdisciplinary field, with many connecting factors to neighboring disciplines - first and foremost, computational linguistics and information science. Detailed descriptive analyses shed some light on the diachronic development of DH and also highlight topics that are characteristic for DH.

Appendix

LuhmannBurghardt2021_Corpus.tsv
A detailed overview of our corpus (incl. journals, data sources, number of articles and tokens)

LuhmannBurghardt2021_Topics.tsv
A detailed overview of our topic model (incl. top terms, evaluation values, top documents)