Analysing an academic field through the lenses of internet science: digital humanities as a virtual community

Abstract

Digital Humanities (DH) has been depicted as an innovative engine for humanities, as a challenge for Data Science, and as an area where libraries, archives and providers of e-research infrastructures join forces with research pioneers. However DH is defined, one thing is certain: DH is a new community which manifests and identifies itself via the Internet and social media. In this paper we propose to describe DH as a virtual community (VC), and discuss the implications of such an epistemic approach. We start with a (re)inspection of the scholarly discourse about VCs, and the analytic frameworks which have been applied to study them. We discuss the aspects that are highlighted by taking such a stance, and use the guidelines proposed by the FP7 European Network of Excellence in Internet Science (EINS) in our investigation.