Digital humanities or humanities in

digital: revisiting scholarly

primitives1
............................................................................................................................................................
Andre Pacheco

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Correspondence: E-mail:
andrez.pacheco@gmail.com
.................................................................................................................................................................................
University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
......................................................................................................................................
Abstract
The use of computing tools and methods has irreversibly impacted the creation, use
and communication of research. As a result, a still divisive movement of digital
humanities (DH) has emerged over the last few decades. This article attempts to
provide a theoretical contribution to the discussion of the core fundamentals of the
field. In order to do so, it takes a sample of papers indexed under Library and
Information Science, in the Web of Knowledge database, and studies them using
a quantitative data analysis and a qualitative literature review combined with the
author’s personal reflection to illustrate the main research topics. The notion of
scholarly primitives, initially formulated by John Unsworth, provides the back-
ground for the theoretical analysis. It is concluded that DH embody a community
patterned by collaborative and shared networks of communication, where digital
tools amplify research possibilities without changing the humanistic values of its
practitioners.

1 Introduction favor of a holistic approach to all literature, charac-

The advent of the digital environment over the last
decades has been accompanied by a deep transform-
ation in how our societies create, record, analyze, and
disseminate information. We are now irreversibly
digital, and so are the procedures on which we base
our activity. Information has become a rich asset that
can be manipulated beyond the traditional analog
restraints, where the sole form of assimilation was
through a slower close reading. On the other hand,
the frustration of being unable to fully digest the
immensurable amounts of sources available today is
giving birth to a rising number of approaches that
discard an individual analysis to focus on a collective
one. An example is the method employed by Franco
Moretti and his colleagues at the Stanford Literary
Lab, where a study was conducted that swayed from
a close, complete reading of few selected canon, in
terized by a distant reading of a much broader set of
works using computing tools for automated data ana-
lysis and pattern recognition (Allison et al., 2011).
This new methodology represents a shift in analysis
from the individual static record to the cluster of
data and metadata from a slow-paced assimilation to
fast-paced processing from single authors to collective
networks. Primarily, it is to be highlighted that the im-
plementation of new technologies represents a social
and cultural phenomenon (Ketelaar, 2007). As Eric
Ketelaar notes, more than allowing a more efficient
optimization of current procedures, the digital envir-
onment allows for new possibilities to create and use
contents, which in turn stimulates other individuals to
work in different collaborative networks. It is, there-
fore, not an overstatement to affirm that ‘we live in
one of those rare moments of opportunity for the
humanities’, with transformations no less profound

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022. V

C The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on 1128
behalf of EADH. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac012 Advance Access published on 25 March 2022

than other major eras of cultural and historical trans-
formation, such as the substitution of the scroll for the
codex, the invention of the movable type, the encoun-
ter with the New World, and the Industrial Revolution
(Burdick et al., 2012).
In Humanistic studies, this form of collaborative
work and use of technological resources lies at the
core of what has become widely known as the ‘Digital
Humanities’ (DH), a broad designation that many
might know, but fewer understand. The scholars are
far from reaching a consensus on what it is: some
regard it as a ‘community’ (Spiro, 2012), or a ‘com-
munity of practice’ (Burdick et al., 2012; Ross, 2012);
others, as a ‘movement’ (Kirschenbaum, 2012; Parry,
2012); an ‘interdisciplinary field’ (Damian et al.,
2015); some refer to it as a ‘discipline’ (Koltay,
2016), while there are those that regard it not as an
‘unified field, but as an array of convergent practices’
(Schnapp and Presner, 2009). The existence of cer-
tain theoretical confusion becomes clear, as it is nat-
ural in any emerging field, including DH. There is,
although, one thing that overarches the work of
digital humanists: the use of digital tools as part of
their research. The concept of scholarly primitives
was suggested by Unsworth (2000) as a means of
assessing scholarly practices in order to develop bet-
ter tools, i.e., tools that incorporate and address d to
the research habits of scholars. As a result, a review of
scholarly primitives and on how they evolved during
the first two decades of the second millennium pro-
vides an opportunity to analyze the evolution of hu-
manistic scholarship and to better understand its
fundamentals.
In this framework, this article attempts to provide a
humble theoretical contribution to the discussions
regarding the nature and orientation of this field.
More than attempting to define such a broad umbrella
as DH, it is perhaps more sensible to try to better
understand what it encompasses. Therefore, the aim
of this article to identify the most relevant sources and
contexts of production of scholarly content on this
field. Based on the selection of those key channels, it
tries to theoretically discuss the nature of the field,
focusing on the relation with Humanities and
Computing, and the ethos that binds digital human-
ists together, questioning if the addition of the adjec-
tive ‘digital’ is truly justifiable from a scientific point of
view.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
Digital humanities or humanities in digital
The importance of this endeavor is justified by
the ‘relative lack of debate and reflection’ in DH
(Zaagsma, 2013). In an area strongly compelled by
the use of technological tools to solve research
problems—as attested by the need to demonstrate
this dimension by adding the adjective ‘digital’ to
Humanities, as a means to differentiate from trad-
itional Humanities—action often takes over reflec-
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tion. As a result, it is crucial to promote discussion
on the ontology of DH.
2 Methodology
A qualitative literature review was performed to illu-
minate the main research problems discussed by the
key players in DH. Due to the vastness of academic
production, it was opted to limit the qualitative ana-
lysis to the works visible in the Web of Science (WoS)
core collection database. The year 2020 has been left
outside the query window due to the fact that, as it is
still undergoing, complete data is still not available.
An initial query under the term ‘digital humanities’
in the ‘topic’ returned 1870 results, which were
refined according to ‘document type’ and ‘WoS cat-
egories’ to only include, respectively, ‘Articles’ and
‘Information Science, Library Science’. The field of
Library and Information Science was chosen since its
actors often operate in the intersection between hu-
manistic, social sciences and technological educa-
tions, therefore creating an interesting subject for
the study. The custom year range was 1945–2019.
A selected corpus for analysis was composed of 254
results.
Amongst these retrieved 254 peer-reviewed articles,
23 (9%) were written in German, whereas the rest was
redacted in English (204 articles or 80%), Spanish (12
articles or 5%), and Portuguese (6 articles or 2%). Due
to linguistic barriers, the German texts were not ana-
lyzed, so the final corpus consisted primarily of those
231 papers. Although not being an extensive universe,
it is also not necessarily a small sample, as it is believed
it represents to a reasonable degree the academic en-
deavor of this field, albeit not definitive. As a result,
the bibliographic analysis of the most influential and
pertinent articles within this sample provided a start-
ing point on which could be sustained the identifica-
tion of the main research problems in DH while also
1129
A. Pacheco
promoting a personal reflection on the topics under
discussion. In turn, this discussion is rooted in the
analysis of the concepts of scholarly primitives, infor-
mation activities, and themes (Unsworth, 2000;
Palmer et al., 2009; Project Bamboo, 2010), which
are now discussed.
2.1 Scholarly primitives, practices and
themes
The notion of scholarly primitives was first suggested
by John Unsworth in 2000, at a symposium on
Humanities Computing. According to the author,
they are meant to act as ‘basic functions common to
scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and in-
dependent of theoretical orientation’ (Unsworth,
2000, paragraph 2). Unsworth engages in the discus-
sion of scholarly primitives as fuel for debate, suggest-
ing the following non-definitive list:
† Discovering
† Annotating
† Comparing
† Referring
† Sampling
† Illustrating
† Representing
The term ‘primitives’ is based on Aristotelian
logic, according to which scientific knowledge
(episteme) ‘must be expressed in statements that fol-
low deductively from a finite list of self-evident
statements (axioms) and only employ terms from
a finite list of self-understood terms (primitives)’
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016,
Section 4). Unsworth argues that such primitives
‘form the basis for higher-level scholarly projects,
arguments, statements, interpretations’ (Unsworth,
2000, paragraph 2). As such, we can interpret these
terms as the basic building blocks that scholarly ac-
tivity builds upon. He was particularly interested in
the basic functions that could be embedded in the
development of tools, in particular in the context of
networked digital information.
Both the application and background of initial use
provide some fertile ideas for analysis. First, as seen in
the previous section, the pressing concern in the de-
velopment of adequate tools is revealing of the empir-
ical orientation of Humanities Computing. Even
though scholarly practices, in abstract, were discussed,
1130 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
their ultimate aim was to provide a framework to the
development of tools more adequate to the needs of
scholars.
Second, these primitives are meant to be diachron-
ic, i.e., they attempt to capture the dimensions of
scholarly activity regardless of medium, which enables
them to be compared over time and technologies. For
example, ‘annotating’ has traditionally been carried
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out by writing on a piece of paper, such as the margin
of a book. In the digital context, basic forms of anno-
tating can be procedures such as inserting a comment
in a PDF file or highlighting certain passages of text.
Third, throughout Unsworth’s text it becomes per-
ceptible that the use of tools as part of research is an
established fact. I find this particularly interesting
since it glimpses at the idea that, as early as by
2000s, the representation of humanistic researchers
locked away in a dimmed-light office, buried under
a pile of dusty books, patiently reading, comparing,
and annotating using their pen and paper, was already
being undermined. Finally, despite the intended tem-
poral neutrality and high-level of abstraction of
Unsworth’s primitives, they were formulated in the
framework of networked digital information.
However, over the last two decades, the reach, com-
plexity, and number of participants in the network has
increased significantly. Likewise, it is expected that
some level of adaptation and revision is needed to
these primitives.
Palmer and her colleagues (2009) introduce the
concept of scholarly information activities, which is
related to Unsworth’s definition of primitives, but
emphasizes the explicit role of information in the con-
duct of research and production of scholarship
(Palmer and Cragin, 2008). This interpretation seems
to account for the increasing importance role of in-
formation during the first decade of this millennium.
Whereas Unsworth’s primitives reported to the activ-
ities of a humanistic scholar, the contribution of
Palmer et al. attempts to provide a framework for
comparison across domains, stepping away from the
behavior of individual researchers, as it is dynamic,
towards the understanding of information work of
scholarly communities. They alter Unsworth’s vocabu-
lary and suggest a more comprehensive framework that
consists of information activities and primitives. In
their definition, a primitive is ‘something at the base
or beginning of a larger process’ (Palmer et al., 2009,
 Digital humanities or humanities in digital

p. 7–8), and that larger process is the scholarly infor-
mation activities. As a result, primitives are considered
to be more granular activities of the broader informa-
tion activities. Additionally, they also suggest the idea of
‘cross-cutting primitives’, which are associated with
more than one activity:
† 1. Searching
† 1.1 Direct searching
detailed but textually-anchored information activities
by introducing ‘themes’ of scholarly practice. These
themes were developed in 2018 over the course of
several workshops that ‘brought together scholars,
IT professionals, and librarians from around the world
to chart a direction for cyberinfrastructure develop-
ment in the humanities’ (Project Bamboo, 2010, p. 1).
Project Bamboo’s framework introduces add-

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† 1.2 Chaining itional format-neutral activities, such as managing
† 1.3 Browsing data, sharing, and funding. These contributions en-
† 1.4 Probing rich Unsworth’s and Palmer’s primitives in the sense
† 1.5 Accessing that they also introduce practices associated with re-
† 2. Collecting search data management, a field that has been
† 2.1 Gathering becoming increasingly significant across every re-
† 2.2 Organizing search domain. Table 1 provides a crosswalk between
† 3. Reading Project Bamboo scholarly themes, Unsworth’s prim-
† 3.1 Scanning itives, and Palmer et al.’s scholarly information
† 3.2 Assessing activities.
† 3.3 Rereading At its core, the conceptual framework of scholarly
† 4. Writing primitives, whether they are called themes or informa-
† 4.1 Assembling tion activities, aims to act as a type of conceptual
† 4.2 Co-authoring checklist for building new digital tools. Conversely,
† 4.3 Disseminating when attempting to build new digital tools, the prior-
† 5. Collaborating ity should not be the awesome features of a new tool in
† 5.1 Coordinating itself, but rather the innovations that it provides in
† 5.2 Networking addressing a particular need of a scholarly primitive.
† 5.3 Consulting In other words, the development of new tools should
† 6. Cross-cutting Primitives always be anchored in scholarly needs, problems and
† 6.1 Monitoring challenges, in a way that tools emerge as a direct
† 6.2 Notetaking method to address those challenges, instead of adapt-
† 6.3 Translating ing the problems to the limits of the tools.
† 6.4 Data Practices Nevertheless, the needs of a certain field change
greatly over time due to various reasons, being tech-
According to this list, searching, collecting, read- nology one of the greatest. To further expand on the
ing, writing, and collaborating constitute the five core scholarly practices in the humanities, it is important to
scholarly activities which are further decomposed in contrast them with the practices in other disciplinary
their corresponding primitives. Despite the expansion fields, namely how they are broadly understood in the
of vocabulary and the concern for information activ- more exact sciences. Palmer et al. (2009) provide an
ities, these scholarly activities are still uniquely focused interesting distinction between the scholarly primi-
on textual materials, as shown by the absence of lis- tives typically associated with humanities and scien-
tening or viewing. ces, as well as those that are interdisciplinary by nature
A third attempt at tackling the complexities of (Fig. 1).
scholarly practice was undertaken by Project In this representation, scholars are represented
Bamboo, a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary according to traditional conceptions of the nature of
endeavor. This project attempts to provide a middle each field. For instance, humanities scholars are per-
ground between Unsworth’s minimalist, abstract and ceived as individuals who ‘typically consult rather
format-neutral primitives and Palmer et al.’s more than collaborate, with the notion of the lone scholar

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022 1131

A. Pacheco

Table 1. Crosswalk between Project Bamboo scholarly themes, Unsworth’s primitives, and Palmer et al.’s scholarly
information activities
Bamboo theme of scholarly practice Unsworth primitive OCLC scholarly information activity
Gathering/Foraging Discovery Searching (direct searching, chaining,
browsing, probing, accessing)
Synthesizing/Filtering Comparing Collecting (gathering, organizing)
Sampling
Contextualizing Referring Searching (chaining, browsing, probing)

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Collecting (organization)
Cross-cutting (monitoring)
Conceptualizing, Refining and Critiquing Illustrating Reading (scanning, assessing, rereading)
Representing Cross-cutting (notetaking, translating)
Comparing Writing (assembling)
Collaborating (consulting)
Documenting methods Representing Writing (disseminating)
Cross-cutting (translating)
Managing data Discovering Searching (accessing)
Referring Collecting (organizing)
Representing Collaborating (coordinating, consulting)
Annotating/documenting Annotating Writing (assembling)
Cross-cutting (notetaking)
Modeling/visualizing Illustrating Cross-cutting (translating)
Representing Writing (assembling)
Overlapping teaching and research Representing Collaborating (coordinating)
Cross-cutting (translating)
Sharing/dissemination/publishing Representing Writing (disseminating)
Funding Suggested parenthetically No analogue
Collaborating Common thread throughout scholarly Writing (co-authoring)
primitives, not listed separately Collaborating (coordinating, networking,
consulting)
Citation, credit, peer-review Referring Reading (assessing)
Writing (dissemination)
Collaborating (consulting)

Extracted from Project Bamboo (2010, p. 2–3).

persisting in some fields’, whereas in the case of exact
scientists ‘collaboration is common, resulting in a
high level of co-authoring and the need to coordinate
activities among the research team’ (Palmer et al.,
2009, p. 35). Although there is some undeniable basis
of truth for this interpretation, consolidated through-
out decades of experience, the consolidation of infor-
mation networks over the last decade has been
shattering some of these traditionally well-defined
frontiers. The field of DH is nowadays regarded as
being invariably collaborative (Borgman, 2009;
Burdick et al., 2012; McCarty, 2012; Chan et al.,
2017; Poole and Garwood, 2018), although that col-
laboration is highly local and dependent on shared
languages, rarely extending to an international reach
(Tang et al., 2017). This may be due to the national or
regional nature of humanities (Nederhof, 2006).
Nevertheless, despite a gradual increase of the average
number of authors per article in recent years, reported
in 2017 to be about 2.3, it is still lower in comparison
to other fields (Tang et al., 2017).
One example is OPERAS (open scholarly commu-
nication in the European research area for the social
sciences and the humanities) a European Union’s
Horizon funded 2020 open research infrastructure
aimed at ‘efficiently address the scholarly communi-
cation needs of European researchers in the field of
social sciences and humanities’ (OPERAS, 2020).
Despite being focused on social sciences and human-
ities, the background of its coordinators covers a wide

1132 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022


Fig. 1 Scholarly primitives associated with disciplinary approach. Extracted from Palmer et al. (2009, p. 35)
array of disciplines, including classical studies, litera-
ture, languages, computer sciences, and data manage-
ment. This diversity also extends to each of its member
organizations, who gather equally multidisciplinary
teams, thus promoting collaboration. Humanities
scholar are increasingly becoming involved in co-
authoring (traditionally a science primitive) as teams
become multidisciplinary and start including inform-
atics and tech people that help building tools.
Another case of dilution of frontiers is concerned
with data sharing. When it comes to personal infor-
mation collections, humanities scholars are described
by Palmer et al. as accumulating documents, whereas
scientists deal mostly with datasets (Palmer et al.,
2009, p. 42). Additionally, it has been noted that,
even though there is perceived potential value for
other users in personal scholarly collections, there is
marginal evidence of sharing practices (Spanner,
2001). However, particularly over the last decade, in-
formation management—in a simple manner, the
control of the procedures of creation, organization
and dissemination of information—has been met
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
Digital humanities or humanities in digital
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with considerable developments in Library and
Information Science fields. The proliferation of insti-
tutional repositories, open access and demand for ac-
countability of publicly funded projects (read, data)
are some of the most visible consequences in the
increasing social and academic demand for data to
be shared in a way that can be reused. As research
across all disciplines is becoming more data intensive,
the need for sound research data management
becomes a need that spans across all disciplinary fields.
For example, the European Commission has been
establishing as a criterion for funding under
Horizon 2020 that every project—including in the
humanities—must detail in a data management plan
what are the expected data outputs and how will they
be made available in a reusable format once the project
ends.
As we see, data sharing can no longer be said to be
specific to sciences. Humanists are assimilating practi-
ces that they did not use to have. At the same time, the
digital is demanding a form of adaptation of high-level
practices that have always been present. Publishing and
1133
A. Pacheco
dissemination are clear examples of how technology
greatly conditions these processes. Printed publications
are being replaced by their digital counterparts, ena-
bling research to reach a wider audience at a faster
rate and lower cost, which in turn increases re-use. In
this context, the value of a certain piece of research in
the digital environment lies no longer in its rarity, but
in its availability and visibility. The implication is that
dividing scientific fields based on primitives seems to be
an oversimplification of a rapidly changing reality. So,
what do humanities, or DH, currently look like?
2.2 From humanities computing to DH
Any debate on such a recent topic as DH must begin
with a conscious act of humbleness. As Parry puts it,
‘none of us really knows what digital humanities is or,
more precisely, that none of us is fully in control of
what digital humanities is’ (Parry, 2012). The problem
here is that DH are a very recent phenomenon that
only in the last decade is starting to significantly echo
through academic organizations, in form of new grad-
uations, courses, conferences, and grants. And as with
every recent phenomenon, it can only be fully under-
stood after it has manifested, the same way that a critic
of an historical period or literary movement may only
be appropriately contextualized after the dust of its
cultural and social impact has settled. Likewise, it is
most likely that some more years (or even decades)
need to pass before it is possible to perceive the degree
of influence of DH, both on the academy and on so-
ciety. Nevertheless, even at this early stage of its evo-
lution timeline, it is possible—maybe even more
pertinent—to reflect on its main points of transform-
ation in an attempt to understand where we stand and
where we are headed to. Therefore, given the rather
nebulous state of the field,2 the purpose of this work is
merely to fuel the discussion on DH and not, by any
means, to end it.
A reasonable starting point could be an attempt to
discuss the scientific positioning of DH, i.e., whether it
should be considered a science, an interdiscipline, a
frontier science, a set of practices, amongst other des-
ignations. However, there is no consensus amongst
practitioners of what DH is (Spiro, 2012). I believe
that, more than trying to provide one more definition
for DH, it is more important to attempt to understand
what it encompasses: the values of its community, the
characteristics of its scholarship, the problems it faces,
1134 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
and the solutions it provides or, according to Parry
(Parry, 2012), how it changes our understanding of
humanities. In fact, this is a rather divisive topic
amongst humanistic scholars, who tend to assume ex-
treme positioning regarding their opinion of DH. On
one hand, using the expressions of Gerben Zaagsma
(Zaagsma, 2013), some scholars, like Roberto Busa
and Franco Moretti, are guided by a ‘technological
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determinism’, i.e., a faith in digital tools to solve re-
search problems, while other more ‘traditionally
minded’ humanists, perceive these changes with dis-
trust. Reporting to the History field, Zaagsma notes a
tendency in scholars to engage in the use of tools with-
out attempting to understand how that use shapes the
way they do history, or, put more simply, to under-
stand what they are actually doing. He identifies this
tendency as the reason for the uneasiness felt by the
more traditional scholars to undergo the new techno-
logical developments (Zaagsma, 2013). This lack of
theoretical debate leads to incomprehension, which
can in turn lead to both a blind and uncritical accept-
ance of this new reality, or to an unjustified fear of the
effect of new technologies. Since both are undesirable,
it is necessary to further reflect on these topics.
The defining feature of the professionals that con-
sider themselves as digital humanists is the use of
computers to conduct humanities research. This
methodological origin is visible in Kirschenbaum’s
question ‘What is (or are) the ‘digital humanities’,
aka ‘humanities computing’? (Kirschenbaum, 2012).
In this work, he argues that the term ‘digital human-
ities’ is an adaptation of the term ‘humanities comput-
ing’. In fact, the first chapter of Blackwell’s A
Companion to Digital Humanities (Schreibman et al,
2004) is elucidatively entitled ‘The history of human
computing’, as it narrates the projects that humanists
have been carrying out with the aid of computing
tools throughout the last decades, since the very first
endeavors of Father Roberto Busa in 1949, until the
most recent projects in 2004.
This progression from ‘a predicative to a substan-
tive focus’ (Meister, 2012) is not without meaning. In
‘humanities computing’ the focus is on the techno-
logical apparatus. Hence, it conveys an ontology cen-
tered on the tools, where the humanities represent a
branch of knowledge where these digital methods are
applied. Thus, it is not surprising to see that digital
humanists are ‘often more concerned with method

than with theory’ (Scheinfeldt, 2012a). It is the cradle
of discipline. The same way that we learn to walk be-
fore we learn how to properly speak, digital humanists
also learned to use before knowing the full potential of
what they were using. This analogy might be rather
abusive, but it serves as an illustration for the fact that
action often comes before reflection. In fact,
Scheinfeldt calls for ‘time to play’ with the new tools,
since he argues that, even though we may not yet
understand the new arguments that arise from the
use of new methods, time will provide the solutions
(Scheinfeldt, 2012b).
Returning to the linguistic discussion, on the other
hand, in the term ‘digital humanities’, the digital fea-
tures as an adjective for the Humanities, a means
according to which the humanistic agenda is carried
out. So, when John Unsworth suggested that
Blackwell’s book should be called not ‘A Companion
to Humanities Computing’, not ‘Companion to
Digitized Humanities’, but instead ‘Companion to
Digital Humanities’ (Kirschenbaum, 2012), he prob-
ably wanted to appeal to an audience of humanists
operating with digital tools. In this formulation, the
core humanistic values, such as inquiry, critical think-
ing, debate, pluralism, and critique (Levine et al.,
1988), lie at the heart of the field.
Let us observe a practical example of these two
positions to better understand the notions under dis-
cussion. In the book Uncharted, Aiden and Michel use
the Google app Ngram Viewer, which allows to search
characters across all Google Books catalogue to reveal
cultural phenomena (Aiden and Michel, 2013).
However, the authors use this tool simply to obtain
very basic conclusions that could be intuitively enun-
ciated, such as the fact that the most frequent occur-
rence in print of any year is of the year of print itself, or
that artists such as Chagall and Beckmann, who were
banned during the Nazi period, do not feature in
German books while the war rages on, but resurface
post-war. In summary, this data illustrates ‘a truism
rather than discovering a truth’ (Kirsch, 2014).
Nonetheless, the tools are not to blame. The problem
lies in the use that is made of it, since ‘computers
detect quantity, not quality’ (Koltay, 2016). As such,
it is the responsibility of researchers to use these tools
to indulge in complex and challenging problems that
could not be explored otherwise, to perceive the qual-
ity amidst the quantity. As Busa argues, the role of
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
Digital humanities or humanities in digital
technology is not merely to lessen human effort and
time, but rather to enhance the quality, depth, and
extension of research (Busa, 1980). A more forward-
thinking use of the digital tools can be exemplified by
the case study no. 4 in Anne Burdick’s book Digital
Humanities (Burdick et al., 2012). Inspired by the
model of online multiplayer games, this project aims
to recreate an Afghan refugee camp in the virtual
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world, reproducing the daily life of the refugees by
collecting testimonials, interviews, photographs, and
videos. As a result, more than collecting and statically
interpreting records on the life of this refugee camp,
researchers aim to ‘create a virtual community of tes-
timony, witness, recovery and social bonding’
(Burdick et al., 2012), which provides an immersive
experience that contributes to a deeper understanding
of this reality that wouldn’t be possible without their
use.
These differences in approach summarize the con-
trast between the two ontologies. In the words of Liu,
‘while digital humanities develop tools, data and
metadata critically, rarely do they extend their critique
to the full register of society, economics, politics, or
culture’, which reflects a ‘lack of cultural criticism’
(Liu, 2012). The digital component cannot be an
end in itself, but a stepping stone to new, more com-
plex and challenging questions. Digital humanists are,
first and foremost, humanists, which means that their
essential mission is to analyze the human cultural
products (which can be expressed in databases, repo-
sitories, graphics, large datasets and so on) in order to
better understand how they shape and impact their
respective society, and they do so by using digital
resources (e.g. data sets and tools, far beyond the
use of Microsoft Office or the email, which is now-
adays trivial and omnipresent in any field of activity),
as illustrated in Fig. 2.
This articulation is simplistic in nature. More than
definitive, it attempts to initiate a discussion on the
essential questions that can provide the most basic—
therefore more important—answers. Although the
concepts under discussion (humanists, cultural prod-
ucts, society impact) seem rather simple, contempor-
ary scholarship tends to add complexity to them. For
instance, the very notion of a humanist is changing
greatly as curricula are becoming more and more
diversified in a hybrid combination of traditional lit-
erature, language and philosophy education, and
1135
A. Pacheco
Fig. 2 The quintessential concepts underlying Humanities scholarly activity
computer science courses. The scope of cultural prod-
ucts also expands as new forms of content creation,
such as comics, series and anime become more main-
stream and become the object of interest of the analyt-
ical eyes of scholars. Regardless of the concepts we use
to fill the who, what and why of Humanities, I would
like to highlight particularly how they are independent
from the how. It cannot be said to be completely inde-
pendent since, as discussed previously, the digital
debuts a social and cultural phenomenon that condi-
tions the framework of research. For instance, could
Biology easily research cells if not for the discovery of
the microscope? However, the use of digital resources
to address research questions should not forcibly con-
dition who asks these questions, why they ask them,
and what they do by asking them. It does condition,
however, how those questions are asked, and how the
answers are obtained. Technology is obviously not neu-
tral, in the sense that, the more resources we have avail-
able to obtain, collect and analyze data, the broader the
scope of questions we can formulate. The opportunities
arising from the adoption of big and smart data in the
humanities taps into the ability to reveal the ‘unknown-
unknowns’ (Borne, 2013). In this case, the digital allows
us to ask questions we would not think of before to
obtain answers that would not be obtainable otherwise.
As a result, the unprecedented benefit of computers
and, by extension, of the digital, is that they ‘inaugur-
ate a school of critique, a new series of tools through
which we can analyze texts’ (Parry, 2012). This means
that this new methodology unveils a vast array of un-
precedented possibilities of inquiry of traditional
1136 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
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humanistic subjects, which were not available before.
As Bogost notes, they represent a ‘great outdoors’
(Bogost, 2012) a sudden new lens through which to
see and, most importantly, understand the world. In
summary:
On the whole, this version of the digital human-
ities treats the digital as an adjective, a word that
modifies the unchanged notion of the human-
ities, leaving the core of what happened un-
altered, instead updating the means by which
it is done (Parry, 2012).
In fact, as Parry argues, using computers to engage in
more complex and efficient text analysis does not dis-
rupt the framing values of the field, instead, it simply
allows them to be performed on a larger scale and at a
faster pace. DH employ computational media to rep-
resent, manipulate, analyze and interpret humanistic
data (Davidson, 2017; Poole and Garwood, 2018). It
then becomes clear that the digital is but a component
added to the humanities, a mere adjective used to
denote the frame of activity without changing the pur-
pose with which it is carried out, whether texts are
analyzed as clusters of data or word counting replaces
a close reading of syntax. Regardless of the method,
the same goal is ever-present: ‘a hermeneutics of the
text meant to discern what it is a text (or a large cor-
pora of texts) means’ (Parry, 2012). In this sense, ra-
ther than a rupture with the past, DH feature as an
adaptation of humanities to the digital age, with
humanities remaining the focus, and with the focus
of humanities to remain bringing ‘the knowledge of

the complex intricacies of human society to light’
(Zeng, 2017, p. 10). Here, ‘text’ should be read in a
broad sense of a record created in the course of a
human cultural activity, since images and video can
be found amongst research data.
In turn, the increasing importance of the digital
component in humanities, as well in all fields of science,
is not only extending the scope of research questions,
but also affecting how scholarship is made. Specifically,
the rapid expansion of communication networks is
enabling scholars to disseminate their endeavors
through channels that defy tradition. Scholarly com-
munication is changing as researchers explore new on-
line channels, from social media, such as Twitter (Ross
et al., 2012; Holmberg and Thelwall, 2014), to blogging,
not to mention the increasingly predominant open ac-
cess to science. This embodies ‘a change not only in
tools and objects but in scholarship itself’ (Parry, 2012).
As a result, the DH practitioners pride themselves in
developing new forms of scholarship that deviate from
the secular academic traditional of individual solitary
creation, towards a ‘community that comes together
around values such as openness and collaboration’
(Spiro, 2012). Additionally, it is possible to expand
the critique of the artificial highlight given to tools in
the very designation of DH. Why must this transition
into the digital require the addition of the adjective to
Humanities? Why do we not see discussions on Digital
Biology or Digital Engineering? These fields, amongst
many others, were also massively affected by the advent
of the digital culture. Yet, their designations remain
unchanged. It is the author’s belief that the ‘digital’
has been added to Humanities as an attempt to create
a rupture with the past. I believe it to be a statement that
seeks to break free from the traditional imagine seclu-
sion of humanitarian scholarship and refurbish the per-
ception of humanities as technologically updated and
well positioned to take advantage of the resources the
digital world in addressing its challenges. Nevertheless,
a scientific justification for the name change must be
provided. So far, such discussion has been remarkably
scarce in the literature. However, there is a probability
that, once the digital methods become common-place,
the term ‘Digital Humanities’ will become outdated,
and perhaps scholars will look back into our period
and wonder if it had been more appropriate for us
regard this emerging face of the field simply as
Humanities in digital.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
Digital humanities or humanities in digital
For these reasons, more than discussing whether
DH are a science or an inter- or trans-discipline, it
seems that it is more consensual to refer to it as an
intellectual space, a community or a movement that
operates through online networks in a transparent,
collaborative and dynamic manner. As Kathleen
Fitzpatrick observed in 2010:
the key problems that we face again and again
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are social rather than technological in nature:
problems of encouraging participation in col-
laborative and collective projects, of developing
sound preservation and sustainability practi-
ces, of inciting institutional change, of promot-
ing new ways of thinking about how academic
work might be done in the coming years
(Fitzpatrick, 2010).
Consequently, in a context of crisis in humanist stud-
ies, the digital humanists are embedded with the pur-
pose of bringing together the public and the
humanities, creating ways to collaboratively and de-
liberately raise public awareness about their research,
teaching, and importance (Liu, 2012).
3 Conclusions
The initial corpus of 254 papers retrieved from the
Web of Knowledge database, filtered down to 231
after removing German texts, that kickstarted the ana-
lysis manifest an English bias, since this language rep-
resents 80% of the texts selected, followed by Spanish
(5%) and Portuguese (2%). It has been noted that
most of the works reproduce projects and experiments
using digital tools, some of which do not proceed to
undergo a wider social and cultural analysis, therefore
leading to a lack of cultural criticism, which is the
main purpose of humanist studies. This is considered
to be a flaw induced by usage of computing tools as an
end, without understanding that they are but an en-
hancer of the research possibilities, and that it is up to
the researchers to provide the explanations of the cul-
tural and social phenomena.
In summary, the DH are being consolidated as a
community that engages in the use of tools and com-
puters as unique opportunities to enrich the meth-
odological approaches and provide more complex
answers to the social, cultural and political problems
1137
A. Pacheco
that our societies face, that could not be researched
and fully understood using traditional methods.
However, this change in methodology does not rep-
resent a change in the nature of the field since the
humanistic values of critical thinking remain at the
core of the research. More than a rupture, there is a
continuity, where we observe no more than an adap-
tation to social transformation that the digital era
brings upon our communities. This adaptation
includes blundering of the traditionally well-defined
frontiers between humanities and scientific scholarly
practice. Primitives that have been traditionally within
the boundaries of ‘hard sciences’, such as data man-
agement and collaboration, are being incorporated by
humanities scholars as they adopt more data intensive
methodologies and engage into more multidisciplin-
ary teams.
Finally, it can be noted a change in mindset in how
humanists approach problems, toward a collabora-
tive, open, transparent, and permanent discussion in
the network. In time, it is my belief that there will be
no further need to use the adjective ‘digital’ and ‘digit-
al humanities’ will once again become ‘humanities’.
Until then, the adjective is necessary to indicate the
methodological, scholarly, and social transition. The
crucial is that humanities do not sell their essence to
technology, becoming diluted in it, but instead con-
tinue doing what they do best: explore and study the
human phenomena, and actively engage with the
community to share their knowledge. The new meth-
ods available today, more than tools at our disposal to
play with, represent a remarkable opportunity for
growth and expansion, both at a level of scale of ana-
lysis and complexity.
As for future works, it could be interesting to ana-
lyze how the growth in DH publications correlates to
the general growth of science, or if it represents an
exceptional phenomenon. Also, bearing in mind the
English-Speaking bias of this work, in the fields of
Library and Information Science, it could be valuable
to perform a similar endeavor in other databases, such
as Scopus, and/or in different fields in order to per-
ceive if these research trends are present in other aca-
demic contexts. The granularity of the analysis of
scholarly primitives could also be deepened. In add-
ition, it seems that the scope of DH is still mostly
centered around the use of tools to perform research.
It seems plausible to also further explore a branch of
1138 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
DH concerned with theoretical discussion of the
transformations that the digital era brings upon indi-
viduals and society. Amongst this debate could be
questions such as privacy, identity, and virtual reality.
Notes
1. This article expands a previous publication by adding
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/37/4/1128/6554036 by UNAM user on 02 March 2023
the discussion on scholarly primitives, updating the
quantitative analysis, and revisiting the literature pub-
lished over the last two years. Originally published as
Andre Pacheco (2018). Under the hood of digital
humanities: toys or opportunities?. In Proceedings of
the Sixth International Conference on Technological
Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM
2018), Salamanca, Barcelona, October 24–26, 2018. 5
pages, doi: 10.1145/3284179.3284223.
2. The website http://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/ is
an interactive and playful example of this diversity
of opinions. As of March 2020, it provides one ran-
dom definition of Digital Humanities out of a pool of
817 every time the page is loaded.
Acknowledgements
This study was fully supported by the Portuguese
Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundaç~ao
para a Ciência e Tecnologia) under the PhD research
grant SFRH/BD/131004/2017.
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