Abstract:

Twenty years ago, A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004) brought together a group of young scholars to discuss, review, and examine the still-young history of Digital Humanities, creating a landmark work in the field’s development. Confronting the chaotic fog of the emerging discipline at the time, the book, with over 600 pages, presented interdisciplinary theories and practical activities, including new processes of academic production, dissemination and curatorship, offering valuable theoretical support and practical experience for both beginners and researchers in Digital Humanities. This article re-examines the key ideas in A Companion to Digital Humanities, linking them longitudinally to A New Companion to Digital Humanities (2016), and finds both continuity and extension in Western digital humanities over the past decade, particularly in areas such as Databases, Modeling, and Robot Poetics. It then compares these developments with The China Digital Humanities Development Report (Volume 1), revealing differences between Chinese and Western digital humanities in their discussions on digital scholarship, visualization, and cultural heritage. Furthermore, the article highlights that Chinese Digital Humanities research still neglects issues of interface design and aesthetics.

Key words: digital humanities , A Companion to Digital Humanities , A New Companion to Digital Humanities