Introduction

Overview

In the era of big data, the development of digital humanities (DH) is driving humanities and social sciences research into a new data-driven research model, providing new research paths and methods for humanities research. In the past decade, DH has emerged in China. Practitioners and researchers in academic libraries, public libraries, library schools, and social science and humanities schools have actively participated in projects and research in DH. This special issue consists of sixteen papers that provide an overview, case studies, highlights of China’s DH practice, and research development from a comprehensive perspective. It has been an honor and a privilege during the process of developing this special issue to get to know these authors and work closely with them. Special thanks go to them all and their teams.

Organization of the Special Issue

Over the course of the last decade in China, DH, the integration of digital technologies and humanities, has rapidly developed as a research area, attracted widening circles of inquiry, and gained prominence as an internationally recognized emerging discipline. In order to review the history and current status of DH scholarship in China, in the first paper professor Xiaoguang Wang (王晓光) and his research team from Wuhan University conducted historical analysis and bibliometrics to reveal the conception and development of DH in China. They analyze the current concrete practice of DH in China through investigations of research institutions, projects, and platforms and well-known scholars and explore the status of DH research in China from macro and micro perspectives.

In the second paper professor Zhangping Lu (卢章平) and his research team from Jiangsu University take humanists as research objects and build a digital academic competence framework by investigating and evaluating their digital academic competence. The entry of the humanities into the digital era has been characterized by the prominence of the two dimensions of technology and humanity, highlighting the trend of their mutual intersection and integration. The traditional research paradigm of humanists has been transformed by digital driving. Based on literature research and semistructured interviews, they adopt grounded theory to find the digital academic competence of humanists in China. This competence is composed of information acquisition competence, digital technology application competence, and digital sharing competence.

In the third paper professor Wang Shen (沈旺) and the research team from Jilin University study the motivations, models, and technical methods of major public libraries in the construction of DH projects by obtaining data and textual information on the status of DH construction in thirty provincial and municipal libraries in China. Hundreds of libraries were researched, and they identified and selected the subjects of a case study. They show that the DH projects of Shanghai Library, East China Normal University Library, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University Library have entered the application stage.

Memory research has become a hot topic in the field of DH, whose methods and tools can help to realize the intellectualization and visualization of urban memory. Professor Li Niu (牛力) from Renmin University and his colleagues take Beijing as an example and use the knowledge map approach to organize, process, and mine archives and documentation data related to urban memory to build a map for the reorganization and reconstruction of urban memory. In the fourth paper they propose a three-tiered “concept-instance-resource” conceptual model that takes the Beijing city gates as a case to test the effectiveness of this model. Their study provides a good exploration of the use of DH methods and tools in memory practice.

In the fifth paper professor Liang Hong (洪亮) from Wuhan University and colleagues study the construction of Tang Poetry (唐诗), one of the representatives of traditional Chinese culture, its intelligent service platform, and explore a new DH research paradigm of artificial intelligence applied to Tang poetry. The platform is designed to integrate poets, poetry, poet experience, and other multidimensional relationships. It can provide intelligent knowledge services such as knowledge visualization, semantic retrieval, association analysis, and knowledge reasoning for the study of Tang poetry. It supports poetry questions and answers, poetry chronicles, and other applications.

The evaluation and selection of Data Repository for Humanities and Social Science (DRHSS...