Transdisciplinarity and digital humanities : lessons learned from developing text-mining tools for textual analysis

Lin, Y

Abstract

The development and implementation of e-Research tools have signified and signalled a dramatic "computational turn" in conducting research in humanities. Digital humanities has been heralded as the future of humanities research. e-Research programmes often emphasise interdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary. Although to some extent these existing observations are valid, I will argue in this paper that the kind of digital humanities facilitated by e-Research tools, if widely adopted, is in fact transdisciplinary, a step further than multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary. The realisation of transdisciplinary research can be seen through looking at the process of developing text-mining tools for social and behavioural scientists in the case study to be introduced in this paper. I will discuss the challenges and implications of such transdisciplinary research in light of this case study. The empirical case study provided here also contributes to the ongoing and long-standing discussion about interdisciplinariy and transdisciplinarity.

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2012
• Deposit Date: Jan 6, 2012
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 5, 2016
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 295-314
• Book Title: Understanding Digital Humanities
• ISBN: 9780230292642
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371934
• Keywords: e-Science, e-Humanity, e-Social Sciences, digital humanity, text-mining, Science and Technology Studies (STS), textual analysis, research methodology,
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230371934