Cross-national digital humanities research collaborations: structure, patterns and themes

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the structure, patterns and themes of cross-national collaborations in Digital Humanities research through the application of social network analysis and visualization tools. Design/methodology/approach The sample includes articles containing Digital Humanities research in the Web of Science Core Collection as of December 2018. First, co-occurrence data representing collaborations among nations were extracted from author affiliations. Second, the descriptive statistics, network indicators and international communities were calculated. Third, the research topics of different cross-national collaboration communities based on ISI keywords, author keywords, title and abstracts were detected. Findings The results show that the scope of international collaborations in Digital Humanities research is broad, but the distribution among nations is unbalanced. The USA, Germany and England were identified as the major contributors. Five research communities are identified, led by the USA, Germany, England, Belgium and France. The communities share common research topics such as history, GIS, text mining, visualization, while each has its own research emphasis. Originality/value This study applied various informetric methods and tools to reveal the collaboration structure, patterns and themes among nations in Digital Humanities research.