Infrastructure and information environment of Digital Humanities from the perspective of scientific analysis

Digital Humanities (hereafter DH) recently became almost the most dynamically developing direction in the Humanities despite the Humanities crisis and scaling-down of Humanities studies in universities and academic centers all over the world. It is not only the transformation in Humanities that leads to this. Significant improvements in algorithms and computational tools that are being used for complex data, as well as social connections via new understandings of language, culture, and history also influence these phenomena. These up-to-date technologies, in addition to appealing to the natural sciences and mathematical knowledge, enhance the status of DH among the scientific community and broaden the opportunities for its rapid development. At the same time, we still witness heated debates about the opportunities and perspectives of DH as a research field (Gold and Klein, 2016). The papers published in 2015-2016 emphasize the DH research priorities such as data analysis and data visualization, studying the creative process of software developers and so on. Striving for a clear picture of DH development, one should study how dynamic the development of the DH infrastructure and its information environment are. That is the objective of the present study. To collect the data for the study we performed the search queries in the Internet engines with the key word “digital humanities” in 6 European and 4 Eastern languages using some automated frameworks. This linguistic diversity the result of preliminary research that has shown that many DH units have their web sites in a national language alone. We processed 4000 search results via content analysis with the help of «Statistica v6.1. Ru» specialized software, Microsoft Access and MySQL databases, and ArcGIS. As a result, we have defined 430 science and education organizations these results lead to. These organizations/ units are active in various areas in Humanities and declare themselves as those related to DH (or we have defined them as such having analyzed their websites). This DH information environment study is based on the analysis of the types of information interactions that appear in DH and form its information environment. An analysis of the verified empirical data allowed the authors to define the organizational forms of the DH science and education units, the main research directions, and localize these units connecting them to the map of the world. The map (open for update) has been designed via an open online tool Google My Maps (Department of Informatics Problems of the Humanities, 2017) Before designing the interactive map, we developed the DH centre database including such fields as title, address, abstract, and information about the unit head, website, contacts, and date of foundation. ArcGIS allows us to automatically process the data on the map according to the database fields and visualize the search results, providing an understandable picture of the digital humanities across the globe. The results of the preliminary study performed in 2015 have been published earlier (Mozhaeva et al, 2016). In the present paper we focused on DH units rather than on papers, extended the data and updated it (as of August 2016). We have extended the number of resources, languages and DH units, finished an interactive map of DH centres and a catalogue of open access software for DH studies that are going to simplify the search for new partners, developing network projects. Those 430 units in 42 countries that we have found are spread over the world (Figure 1):