White Papers

Digital Technology and the Humanities

Eleanor Collins and Norm Hirschy

Published: 02 October 2024

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This paper highlights trends within digital humanities scholarship, seeks to understand how the shifting landscape of digital publishing impacts the future of scholarly output, and how authors, librarians, and funders can maximise the reach and influence of research.

Eleanor Collins

Lead Acquisition Editor for Literature at Oxford University Press

Eleanor Collins is the lead Acquisition Editor for Literature at Oxford University Press, and is responsible for commissioning Literature titles from the medieval period through to the end of the nineteenth century. She has a keen interest in projects which seek to advocate the value of the humanities.

Norm Hirschy

Senior Acquisition Editor at Oxford University Press

Norm Hirschy is a Senior Acquisition Editor at Oxford University Press, specialising in music history and theory, dance, and media studies. The books he publishes offer serious research from a range of methodologies and approaches to both trade and academic audiences.

The world is changing, and so is publishing. Online publication instantly makes new research available to a global audience of hundreds of thousands of researchers, policy-makers, and students. Research is translated into real-world action with unprecedented speed. At the same time, the new digital landscape can be difficult to navigate. With so many new opportunities to enrich, publish, and promote research outcomes, what are the best ways to create engagement and impact? How can authors, as well as those supporting and funding new research, best take advantage of the wide range of new technologies and means of dissemination?

In this white paper, Eleanor Collins, Acquisitions Editor for Humanities, and Norm Hirschy, Executive Editor, draw on OUP’s extensive web of data to tell a compelling story of digital transition. The paper sheds light on how new technologies have reshaped research methods and outputs in the humanities, enabling new connections across disciplines. By analyzing digital consumption and Open Access trends, it explains how the shifting landscape of digital publishing impacts the future of scholarly output in the humanities, and how authors, librarians, and funders can maximise the reach and influence of research.

Understanding the Digital Humanities

Digital technology underpins some of the most innovative new work in the humanities. To undertake humanities research today one must avail oneself of digital tools. The use of digital technologies to develop and analyse textual editions, to represent and scrutinize the contents of archives, and to map connections and relationships between literary and historical texts, movements, or individuals, for instance, has enlivened the researcher’s relationship with their material. The application of computer software and new digital means of representing data brings both greater breadth and specificity to academic interpretation.

Interdisciplinarity lies at the heart of humanities research projects which combine specialist knowledge of a particular research area with the use of digital technology. Projects which combine the humanities with digital technology usually share methodological approaches rather than subject matter. They may pursue achievements or outputs by adopting digital tools to handle and parse information, digitizing texts or other documentary materials, and/or creating new digital archives. These projects can also draw on data visualization, statistical analysis, and – increasingly – generative artificial intelligence. In effect, new conclusions are formed about material which has been traditionally housed within one academic discipline. These projects thus bring together the expertise of those working within or across the humanities with computer scientists, software engineers and specialists in the organization of knowledge and data.

Creating Connections Across Disciplines

The Network Map below (Figure 1) illustrates the extent to which digital technology is embedded within different humanities subjects.

Figure 1 Network Map: Boolean search of “digital humanities” and “analytical” by mean citation count.
Source: Dimensions.
Notes: The numbers given in Figure 1 refer to Subject Codes.

The core humanities disciplines like music performing arts, art history, and literary studies on the far right of the graph are typically connected to information and computing by way of a different subject like history, or education.

As Figure 1 shows, the range of disciplines and subject areas engaged with work at the intersection of the humanities and the digital is far-reaching. The shape and output of each individual project varies depending on the nature of the researcher's query and the corpus of evidence – be that the musical works of Beethoven, the cinematic output of a prolific director, or an archive of unpublished sixteenth-century letters. But the application of digital technology equips a research team with new sets of questions to ask of their material, and as such it can reset the horizons of enquiry. With that comes the opportunity to look afresh at evidence and documents that may feel familiar, the arguments around them well-rehearsed. Hidden connections can emerge, new categories of evidence defined, and evidence relating to the past can open up in ways that may alter research approaches and methodologies of the future.

The impact of work at the intersection of digital technology and the humanities is further amplified by funding bodies’ Open Access mandates, and by the increased flexibility of publishers when it comes to hosting research and associated data sets online. Not only do digital publishing platforms offer scholars convenient and cost-effective access to an array of materials from journals to books to primary sources, but they also allow researchers to present results in a variety of formats in addition to the written word: audio, video, data visualization, and interactive storytelling in maps and timelines, for example. What is more, they facilitate interdisciplinary discoverability with unprecedented ease, opening new research journeys across disciplinary boundaries and fostering innovative connections between scholars working in different fields and geographies. This is shown in more detail in two case studies.

Case study: The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning

Engagement with⁴ The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning, edited by Janice L. Waldron, Stephanie Horsley, and Kari K. Veblen provides dramatic evidence of the impact potential for digital humanities projects. This truly intersectional handbook both examines how social media is now fully engrained in all forms of music learning and offers practical insights into implications for music educators and pedagogies. This project was published in October 2020, during a time in which it was becoming clear that the effects of the Covid pandemic would be long-term and particularly pronounced in music education. The book offers readers new ways of using digital communication technologies to build participatory music-making communities that proved especially valuable in the face of Covid quarantines and social distancing. The contributing authors come from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, ensuring that the book offers ideas for practical applications of digital technologies that can be enacted across different social geographies. The Handbook received 2,070 unique title requests between October 2022 and July 2024, two years on from first publication; it has been cited in four Wikipedia articles, and one news outlet, the latter of which explored the ways in which research opportunities in music studies were developed and adapted by researchers during the Covid pandemic.

Notes: ^4. A unique title request (UTR) is a count of visits per title that include at least one COUNTER5-compliant view or download.

Case study: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities is an OUP journal with an international readership and growing author and subscriptions base. An analysis of journal usage data suggests that some of the most widely disseminated work at the intersection of the humanities and digital technologies includes research that either offers reflection on the methods, ethics, and practices of digital technology, or posits more practical explanations of the specific benefits and uses of new research tools. This paper highlights two articles with particularly strong usage statistics to identify features which generate impact.

The article with the highest number of views in the period from June 2022 to July 2024 is Gerben Zaagsma’s ‘Digital History and the Politics of Digitization’ (Volume 38, Issue 2, Pages 830–851). This article explores the politics, ethics, and contexts of (digital) heritage preservation, and reflects on some of the practices that have been adopted in historical research aided by the tools of digital resources. Zaagsma concludes with a series of recommendations for those working within the field, including the need to ensure that future work becomes truly global in scope, so as to ‘include a broader range of actors, perspectives, and concerns than currently seems the case’.

A different category of work with high viewing figures includes articles which engage directly with specific digital methodologies and applications. A paradigmatic article in this category is ‘Understanding and explaining Delta measures for authorship attribution‘ by Stefan Evert, Thomas Proisl, Fotis Jannidis, Isabella Reger, Steffen Pielström, Christof Schöch, and Thorsten Vitt (Volume 32, Issue Suppl. 2, December 2017, Pages ii4–ii16) – available open access. The article explains a particular stylometric measure used to identify the specific authorship of a text. As Figure 2 below indicates, views have not followed a downward linear trend, but remained relatively high with a peak in 2022/23

Creating Lasting Impact and Engagement

We asked visitors to Digital Technology and Humanities content on Oxford Academic for their views on what most effectively creates impact. Open Access availability, citations, and easy discoverability were the clear frontrunners. Traditional markers of impact such as book reviews in journals and conference presentations carried less weight. The emphasis on Open Access and discoverability is indicative of the shift to digital dissemination and the role of online platforms in maximising impact. It also reflects a focus on inclusivity across the academic community, when it comes to making research available for multiple readerships and research communities.

As shown in Figure 4, the number of visits to Open Access titles in OUP’s humanities publishing has grown significantly in number since 2019, demonstrating how Open Access publication can enhance the reach of research (and, by extension, to increase citation counts). As well as being available as Open Access titles, each of these works are discoverable through well-formulated metadata on the Oxford Academic platform.

Impact is not only created by the far-reaching dissemination of research outcomes but also the free availability of the data from which the authors’ conclusions were drawn. For example, OUP has made data from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography freely available to digital humanities researchers to enable data visualizations at Kindred Britain and Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.

The online traffic per digital humanities title is, on average, higher than for titles across the rest of the humanities.

A closer look at digital humanities titles casts light on their online usage over time. Figure 5, above, charts the number of VCEs over time, indicating a clear upward trend in visits to this content. The graph shows cumulative usage, with the lowermost layer representing titles published by the beginning of 2018. The additional layers indicate VCEs to titles published since that time.

Trending research areas

Though the increase in VCEs over time is influenced by the publication of new titles, the lowermost portion shows that VCEs for backlist titles published before 2018 increased as we move further away from publication date. This indicates the enduring currency of digital humanities work, and a wider upward trend within the discipline. The online traffic per digital humanities title is, on average, higher than for titles across the rest of the humanities. This suggests that digital humanities research has the potential to attract broader readerships over time.
 

Digital technology has transformed the way researchers in the humanities think about the impact of their research by giving them new tools to scrutinize and find meaning in their sources

In terms of topics, Figure 6 shows the research categories in which work associated with digital humanities is trending. The largest cluster of publications relates to Language, Communication, and Culture, with further clusters in the humanities around Creative Writing, History, and Philosophy.

Maximizing Impact: A Set of Recommendations

Digital technology has transformed the way researchers in the humanities think about the impact of their research by giving them new tools to scrutinize and find meaning in their sources. Digital computation methods reveal hidden connections between research topics, facilitating interdisciplinary discovery and conversations across fields. The results these technologies deliver are associated with better discoverability and higher engagement. Because of this, there is likely to be a lasting increase of interest in (and funding for) research projects which take full advantage of the latest developments in digital capabilities both in formulation of research methods and in presentation of research output. This paper concludes with a set of recommendations for researchers and funding bodies, intended to help maximize the impact of their published work:

1. Build the right team

Actively ensure that project teams are set up to work with, or have support from, all disciplines which the research covers, including for example software engineers and website designers. Since interdisciplinarity is a significant driver of impact, it’s important to have researchers from key areas on board from the outset.

2. Think about where the research fits

Have a clear idea of the particular subject area which best fits the outcomes of your project, as this will enable the work to be discovered alongside other similar projects, maximizing readership, impact, and research connections. It will also assist librarians when thinking about how best to place and position your work in relation to other research in the field.

3. Think about where the research ends

The creation of ‘open-ended’ digital resources or websites can be difficult to maintain. A permanent online platform outside of the publisher’s offering also requires continued investment and resourcing. Librarians can co-ordinate cataloguing efforts with the work of publishers in order to ensure that research projects remain visible to the right audiences.

4. Identify how to best reach your audiences

Much digital humanities work aims to engage specific groups of readers from communities beyond the academy. Think carefully about how to reach these readers – and continue to engage them – including through project websites or social media accounts.

5. Try to secure Open Access funding

Based on usage and citations, Open Access publication is strongly associated with increased reach and can therefore be a cost-effective way of generating impact.

6. Choose the publisher carefully

Work with publishers whose online platforms are at the forefront of digital capabilities, including empirical measures like Domain Authority Ranking as well as capabilities like incorporating video, links, and data sets.

7. Think carefully about the output

Take advantage of the capabilities of publishers’ digital platforms. Aspire to create work that is channel-agnostic: material that can be exported and shared on social media, for instance.

8. Pay attention to metadata

Pay careful attention to features such as the title, abstracts and keywords, and other metadata that, if done effectively, will increase the work’s discoverability and draw in new readers. Researchers, librarians, and publishers can usefully collaborate in this field.

9. Talk to the publisher about indexing and cataloguing the work

Often, humanities projects which draw on digital capabilities exist as independent data sets and websites that are not indexed and are, therefore, difficult for readers to find unless they know what they are looking for. Publishers and librarians can play an important role in bringing content together, ensuring that the work remains more visible and accessible online.