A longitudinal study of intellectual cohesion in digital humanities using bibliometric analyses

As digital humanities continues to expand and become more inclusive, little is known about the extent to which its knowledge is integrated. A bibliometric analysis of published literature in digital humanities was conducted to examine the degree of its intellectual cohesion over time (1989–2014). Co-authorship, article co-citation, and bibliographic coupling networks were generated so SNA based cohesion analysis can be applied. Modularity maximization partition was also performed to both co-citation and “author bibliographic coupling” networks to identify main research interests manifested in the literature. The results show that, as publications in digital humanities continue to grow, its diversity and coherence, two hallmarks of interdisciplinarity, have shown signs of becoming more robust. The co-author network, however, remained rather fragmented, with collaboration mainly limited by language and geographic boundaries. The domain specific practices in digital humanities that might contribute to such fragmentation was discussed.