JASIST special issue on digital humanities (DH)

More than 15 years ago, A Companion to Digital Humanities marked out the area of digital humanities (DH) “as a discipline in its own right” (Schreibman et al., 2004, p. xxiii). In the years that followed, there is ample evidence that the DH domain, formed by the intersection of humanities disciplines and digital information technology, has undergone remarkable expansion. This growth is reflected in A New Companion to Digital Humanities (Schreibman et al., 2016). The extensively revised contents of the second edition were contributed by a global team of authors who are pioneers of innovative research in the field. Over this formative period, DH has become a widely recognized, impactful mode of scholarship and an institutional unit for collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publication (Burdick et al., 2012; Svensson, 2010; Van Ruyskensvelde, 2014). The field of DH has advanced tremendously over the last decade and continues to expand. Meanwhile, competing definitions and approaches of DH scholars continue to spark debate. “Complexity” was a theme of the DH2019 international conference, as it demonstrates the multifaceted connections within DH scholarship today (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, 2019). Yet, while it is often assumed that the DH is in flux and not particularly fixed as an institutional or intellectual construct, there are also obviously touchstones within the DH field, most visibly in the relationship between traditional humanities disciplines and technological infrastructures. Thus, it is still meaningful to “bring together the humanistic and the digital through embracing a nonterritorial and liminal zone” (Svensson, 2016, p. 477). This is the focus of this JASIST special issue, which mirrors the increasing attention on DH worldwide. The goals for this issue are to concentrate attention on DH concepts, theories, methods, and analyses and to showcase the infrastructures of DH and its standard practices, the methodological and technological advancements in DH research, and critical matters that have shaped the development of DH. It also aims to map out a research agenda that identifies critical points of intersection and gaps in knowledge that require collaboration between information science and technologies (IST) professionals and DH scholars, as well as the establishment of a common theoretical framework for understanding key issues and research questions.