The Lusophony Digital Humanities and what they (we) are doing from the South: 

textual corpus analysis and FAIR principles to tackle hegemony 

 
Digital Humanities 2020, Ottawa.  
 

Ricardo M. PIMENTA, IBICT, Brazil, orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1612-4126 

Priscila R. CARVALHO, IBICT-UFRJ, Brazil, orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3042-1669  

Josir C. GOMES, IBICT-UFRJ, Brazil, orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7629-1404  

Introduction 

The year 2018 witnessed a significant growth of research groups and laboratories dedicated to 

Digital Humanities in Brazil, however, without producing for this international community. Nowadays, 

the Digital Humanities are beginning to gain greater public interest in Brazil and other countries in South 

America.  

In this perspective, our research would like to discuss what is produced in the Lusophone-speaking 

Digital Humanities in South America. The difficulty in diagnosing such production is evident because 

the global information regime has surrendered to the socio-technical and cultural monopoly mediated 

by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, major technological players (Fiormonte & Sordi 

2019). In the case of the Portuguese-speaking world, it is noticeable the language barrier often puts the 

debate and dialogue-less in evidence. In addition, English literature as it is evidently English-speaking 

escapes from the larger question of problematization in the face of critical thinking, which is 

decolonization. 

Methodology 

The present work came from the research data of Gomes et. al. (2018) that retrieved Digital 

Humanities academic papers, thesis, and books written in the Portuguese language from Google Scholar. 

Despite Google Scholar’s public access, it does not apparently provide consistent means that meet FAIR 

principles - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (Wilkinson et. al 2016), due to concentration 

and opacity of information retrieved, that it may be visible but not operable. 

This empirical study analyzed 454 abstracts which composed the textual corpus through text mining 

techniques with IRaMuTeQ - Interface "R" for Multidimensional Analysis of Texts and Questionnaires 

(Marchand & Ratinaud 2012). 

Results of IRaMuTeQ 

 

 
Figure 1: Similitude by IRaMuTeQ 

 

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1612-4126
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3042-1669
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7629-1404


 

 

The result of the similitude analysis, based on the graph theory, unveiled possible thematic 

convergences of the Portuguese language production in the Digital Humanities. The graph showed a 

central cluster represented by the term digital, which has a semantic attraction with the following terms: 

conceito, texto, meio, ferramenta, linguagem, and interação. In addition, this cluster has two subclusters 

identified by artigo and processo, as well it links other opposing clusters: novo, estudo, and pesquisa.  

On the top right, the cluster novo has two subclusters, social and nao. In the first subcluster, the 

term social presented a possible connection between the highlighted terms: comunicacao, informacao, 

social, and rede. The second subcluster demonstrated a balance between the terms: internet, possivel 

and acesso. On the bottom left, the cluster estudo exposed the term analisar in evidence, and it links to 

the cluster pesquisa which is on the extremity of the graph.  

From this analysis, it can infer the term set reflects actions, products, secondary research objects, 

and methods, besides the problems and challenges of non-internet access in South America. 
 

 
Figure 2: Word Cloud by IRaMuTeQ 

 

The word cloud allowed the quick visualization and identification of the main keywords of the 

textual corpus: digital, analisar, pesquisa, novo, comunicacao, pesquisa, tecnologia and nao. 

Furthermore, this result reinforced the perception of the similitude analysis.  

Conclusions 

The usual bibliometric retrieval based on Web of Science and Scopus databases does not show the 

plethora of academic papers produced on Global South. From a decolonizing perspective, this study 

shows that scraping Google Scholar data could bring a broader result if you want to analyse Portuguese 

scientific production. In addition, the use of Zenodo allowed the research result to have a visibility to 

the public outside Brazil allowing that South America production could integrate Lusophone Digital 

Humanities in the global context, thus representing an important and necessary techno political action 

for researchers from that language community.  

References 

Fiormente, D., Sordi, P. (2019). “Digital Humanities of the South and GAFAM. For a Geopolitics of 

Digital Knowledge”. Liinc em Revista, Rio de Janeiro, 15 (1), pp.108-130. 

Gomes, J., Castro, F., Pimenta, R. (2018). “Google Scholar como fonte de medição da produção 

científica lusófona”. LATmetrics - Anais do I Congresso de Altmetria e Ciência Aberta na América 

Latina. Dataset accessible: https://zenodo.org/record/1969123 

Marchand, P., Ratinaud, P. (2012). “L'analyse de similitude appliquée aux corpus textuels: les primaires 

socialistes pour l'élection présidentielle française”. Actes des les Journées Internationales d'Analyse 

Statistique des Données Textuelles, pp.687-699. 

Wilkinson, M. D., M. Dumontier, I. J. Aalbersberg, G. Appleton, M. Axton, A. Baak, N. Blomberg, et 

al. (2016). “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship.” 

Scientific Data 3 (1): 160018. doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.18. 

https://zenodo.org/record/1969123