Currently,
digital humanities claims to prioritize linguistic research, but its focus is
actually limited to fields such as computational linguistics, lacking a
comprehensive understanding of the current development of the linguistics as a
discipline. The article is an interview with Dr.Huang He from the Institute of
Modem Languages and Linguistics, Fudan University, an active scholar in the
field of linguistics, especially dialectometry. The purpose is to clarify the
relationship between linguistics and digital humanities. Dr.Huang believes that“digital humanities” should refer to humanities
research assisted by digital technology, while linguistics is a complex group
of disciplines, with fields that lean towards the humanities, such as literary
linguistics; fields that lean towards the natural sciences, such as neurolinguistics;
and those with a nature of social sciences, such as geolinguistics. The
application of quantitative methods in the latter two is already widespread,
which might be one of the reasons why the concept of“digital humanities” is less emphasized in linguistics.
The label“digital humanities” is meaningful during a certain
historical period, but its scope will gradually narrow, and it does not meet
the basic requirements to constitute an independent discipline. Furthermore,
using dialectometry as an example, Dr.Huang points out some problems in current
quantitative research in this field and the essential elements that a good
quantitative study should have, providing insights for digital humanities
research in various fields.
