Table of Content

28 September 2024, Volume 4 Issue 3

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Digital Humanities: Mission Accomplished? An Analysis of Scholarly Literature

Emanuele Salerno, Trans. Chen Long

2024, 4(3):  3-19. 

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The field of digital humanities has evolved throughout the parallel evolution of computers, software and networking techniques, as well as the different attitudes of interested scholars. Since the earliest historical phases of this research field, scholars have been debating whether it can be considered as a new academic discipline and whether it is revolutionary in nature. About 20 years ago, the early denotation of “humanities computing” evolved to the present label of DH, and deep changes occurred in digital information technologies, as well as in their humanities applications. Meanwhile, dedicated academic curricula were launched, thus adding an argument in favor of the debated disciplinarity of digital humanities. This paper gives an account of the relevant scholarly debate, distinguishing between the early period and the most recent years; it then tries to frame this process in a model of scientific revolution.

Explicit or Implicit Digital Humanities? An Examination of Search Strategies to Retrieve Digital Humanities Publications from Large-scale Scholarly Databases

Li Kai, Ma Rongqian, Fang Zhichao, Trans. Zhang Tongrui

2024, 4(3):  20-38. 

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As a growing research field, digital humanities (DH) is receiving increasing attention from quantitative science studies using standardized scholarly databases. However, one of the challenges of this new line of research is how to select the query strategy to produce a representative sample of the field. In this research, we analyzed the differences between two publication samples acquired from the Dimensions database using two sampling approaches, namely, a keyword search and a DH journal list. We argue that these two samples offer distinct perspectives on the conceptual landscape of digital humanities, namely, implicit DH and explicit DH, and contribute to building a more comprehensive representation of the DH research domain. We identified notable differences between the publication samples from these two query strategies, especially the fact that these two samples have a very small overlap of publications, and they also have different disciplinary orientations. Our findings indicate that future quantitative studies analyzing DH publications should use more inclusive methods to cover both the implicit and explicit types of DH contributions. Moreover, we also discussed how our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the disciplinary composition of DH, an interdisciplinary research field.

Digital Humanities and Open Agenda

Simon Mahony, Chen Xingyi, Wang Puyu

2024, 4(3):  39-46. 

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Digital humanities, as an active promoting force of the Open Agenda, shares the same core values with Open Science: freedom, collaboration, inclusion, sharing, openness, and transparency. Digital technologies not only provide the technical foundation for realizing freedom, openness, and sharing, but they also transformed human thinking and the paradigms of scientific research. The widespread application of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, has exerted a significant impact on the disciplinary literacy, research paradigms, and trends of digital humanities. Simon Mahony, Emeritus Professor of Digital Humanities at University College London (UCL), has been active in the field for over 20 years. As a contributor, researcher, and educator in digital humanities, he analyzes the development of this field from a comprehensive perspective. Through three in-depth interviews with Professor Mahony, this article discusses the spirit of openness in digital humanities, starting from the Open Agenda and Open Science, with a particular focus on the development and future of digital humanities in the era of artificial intelligence. By conducting a comparative analysis of domestic and international discussions surrounding the Open Agenda, this article aims to uncover the various focal points and its potential development in China, providing new perspectives for digital humanities spirit of openness and exploring its expansive prospects in the new era.

Exploring the Construction of a Historical Population Geographic Database in Small Mountainous Regions——A Study on the Wenshan River Basin in Eshan County, Yunnan Province

Bai Yujun

2024, 4(3):  47-65. 

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Historical population geography database is an effective method to integrate and manage population historical materials with spatial attributes. Population historical materials of small mountainous regions are important resources for the study of historical population geography, population history, historical ethnic geography and other disciplines, with more obvious spatial, temporal and attribute characteristics, which are suitable for the construction of historical population database. Based on the processing method of multi-source information, the paper designs a historical population geography database structure with clear spatial and temporal attributes for the last 300 years in the Wenshan River Basin, and builds it into a database platform for population historical materials, with a view to serving the academic research of related disciplines and the real problems of population change.

Topic Analysis of Uyghur Twelve Muqam Based on Text Mining Methods

Kai Limai, Li Beibei, Zhang Shuying, Zhong Lei, Yang Zekun

2024, 4(3):  66-87. 

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The Uyghur Muqam is an artistic treasure developed in the long history, which integrates various artistic expressions, such as songs, dances and instrumental performances. And it is one of the worlds intangible cultural heritage. Nowadays, Uyghur Muqam is facing challenges on the inheritance, development and dissemination in the digital era, with a lack of comprehensive information resource construction and mining. We used NLP techniques to process Uyghur Twelve Muqam lyrics. Then we applied topic analysis, co-occurrence word analysis and social network analysis towards the content. This work aims to extract the topics of the Twelve Muqam libretto, establish a co-occurrence word network and Poet-topic two-mode network. Our purpose is to explore the commonality and characteristics of Uyghur Twelve Muqam lyrics and styles among different poets, showing the symbolic features in uyghur culture, values and aesthetics.




The Identification and Analysis of Emotional Process of Nie Er on Revolutionary Road: Centered on His Diary and His Letters

Zhang Zihe, Huang Tiyang

2024, 4(3):  88-103. 

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By using the method of emotional analysis, this paper analyzes the emotional characteristics of revolutionary figures' diaries, letters and other documents, and analyzes the development process of their revolutionary spirit, which is beneficial to further inherit the revolutionary tradition and carry forward the revolutionary spirit. This paper extracts and cleans the sentence data in Nie Er’s diaries and letters, uses the Senta model to identify the emotional characteristics of Nie Er, transforms the emotions into measurable values and visualizes them, and uses machine learning to study the characteristics of Nie Er’s emotional changes. From the perspective of data analysis, the emotional process of Nie Er’s revolutionary road is constructed. The study found that the three key events of witnessing the reactionaries’ suppression of teachers and classmates, personally experiencing the Battle of Shanghai and secretly joining the Communist Party of China had a profound impact on Nie Er’s emotional changes, and then formed his gradual decline period, fluctuation period, fluctuation recovery period and continuous improvement period. The four emotional stages of life reflect his life journey from establishing revolutionary consciousness to participating in the revolution and then to publicizing the revolution. It is believed that sentiment analysis provides a new method and perspective for the study of historical figures. By analyzing and displaying the interaction between the emotional process of the characters and the social background, it is helpful to explore the process of emotional change and the establishment and development of revolutionary spirit.

Things with Agency in Video Games: The Intertwinement of Rules and Narratives

Chen Xin

2024, 4(3):  104-114. 

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Since the renowned debate between ludology and narratology, the rules and narratives of games, as well as their interrelationship, have been recurrent themes in games studies. Today, games have emerged as one of the most influential digital cultural products. Many game developers, while striving to enhance the playability of games, are also consciously pursuing exceptional narratives. In this context, the most critical question is no longer whether video games are fundamentally about rules or narratives, but rather what the relationship between rules and narratives in games is and how they can be better integrated. By incorporating Alfred Gell and other post-humanist, re-examining the relationship between rules and narratives from the perspective of things in games can deepen our understanding of this is sue. Things in video games can be categorized into different types; some are fictional, akin to those in traditional media such as novels and films, while others follow certain rules and are simulated or real. Rules endow the latter type of things with stronger agency, providing the possibility for creating a new form of interactive narrative and offering a path worth exploring for other digital cultural products that also emphasize interactivity. At the same time, it can be seen that the designer of a digital text has more and more specific means of planning the behavior of the readers (players) than the author of a traditional books, and that the person who reads the hypertext or plays the game is never freer than the person who reads traditional books.

The Development of Stylometry in Japan: From Article Psychology to Digital Humanities

Wang Zirui

2024, 4(3):  115-128. 

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This study aims to systematically trace the history and development of stylometry in Japan from the perspectives of temporal evolution and content classification through a literature review. It also analyzes representative cases and characteristics of stylometry in Japanese literary research. The evolution of Japanese stylometry has exhibited distinct localized features: in the 1930s, it emerged in the field of psychology with minimal influence from Western theories; around the 1960s, the establishment of the Mathematical Linguistic Society of Japan facilitated the popularization of quantitative linguistic methods; and after the 1990s,advancements in computer technology and statistics ushered in a period of prolific research output. Throughout this extensive accumulation process, Japanese stylometry has gradually developed interdisciplinary characteristics that intertwine linguistics, psychology, and literature, establishing a research paradigm that merges the sciences and humanities and emphasizes problem-oriented inquiry. This has resulted in a wealth of practical research findings that serve as important references for domestic literary studies.