Microsoft Word - Paper-Quoc_Tan_Tran_v2.edited.docx The emergence of the Digital Humanities: An epistemological cartography of thematic issues in French academic journals Quoc-Tan Tran, GERiiCO Laboratory, University of Lille (France), The growing importance of the computational turn has profoundly affected the landscape of the social sciences and humanities (SSH). One of the most profound transformations caused by the development of digital technologies is the changes of the practice conditions and the production of knowledge (Berry, 2011; Gold, 2012; Liu, 2009). In recent years, French academics working in the SSH have been devoting attention to “Digital Humanities” (DH), a novel territory that fosters collaboration, openness, and enhancement of knowledge. By assessing the emergence of those new practices, we can (re)discover a close link between technical culture and the culture of scholars. Since the culture related to computers appears highly technical (Guichard, 2013), it is an epistemological challenge to provide a critical assessment of the evolution, the structure and the dynamics of this new phenomenon. The study of this effect in the light of new epistemologies and paradigm shifts is promising in such a way that allows us to understand what is fabricated in the phenomenon, in terms of digital culture, both profanely and scholarly, and how much our digital practices are orchestrated (Granjon & Magis, 2016; Kitchin, 2014). The starting point of this work is to trace the emergence of DH, using corpus analysis, through particular thematic issues of French academic journals. The next initiative is to find ways to illustrate, using cluster analysis, how digital mediation and networked collaboration influence the problematic(s) and the episteme(s) of disciplines commonly grouped under the label SSH: the adoption of emerging approaches and new research methods, editorial practices, and also combinatorial potentialities and questions posed by the uses of the “digital”. Corpus analysis This task aims to map principal themes and emerging practices of French academic sphere, in terms of research, knowledge production and dissemination. The further objective is to locate, by a cartographic and cluster-based approach, the current state and scientific positioning of France research in the international context. The scope is not extended to the whole French-speaking landscape, which means that the research is bounded to the academic journals in France only, not in Belgium, Quebec, Switzerland, and the francophone African countries. The database Cairn and the portal Revues.org offer the comprehensive collection of French language publications in the SSH. The material analyzed has been collected from nine academic journals (electronic and print) (see Table 1), which have thematic issues dedicated to the topics of DH. It should be noted that four of them are published exclusively in electronic format, showing innovation in the way that scientific information is communicated to the research community. The corpus is composed of 77 articles (of which 30 is co- authoring) in ten issues, whose themes vary from neo-structural sociology, critical theory, to transmedia and computer literacy (see Table 2). All of the issues had been published in a period of fewer than three years. It is noticeably short when we consider the publishing process in scholarly journals, but also remarkable regarding an "emergence." The earliest issue titled “Digital epistemologies of the SSH”1 appeared in Revue Sciences/Lettres (n°2, 2014). The latest thematic issue is "DH and Information and Communication Sciences," which had been published in Revue française des SIC (n° 8) in April 2016. Table 1 Distribution of the articles analyzed per newspaper Journals Abbreviation Type N Cahiers du Numérique CdN P, E (c)* 14 Critique C P, E (c) 10 Multitudes M P, E (c) 4 Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances RAdC P, E (c) 5 Revue Française des SIC RFdSIC E (r) 8 Revue Sciences/Lettres RSL E (r) 12 Socio S P, E (r) 10 Tic & Société TS E (r) 8 Variations V E (r) 6 Total 77 *Notes: P = print; E = electronic; (c) = available in Cairn; (r) = available in Revues.org It is astonishing when we take into account the journals’ periodicity. While only Critique is published monthly, three are quarterly (Cahiers du numérique, Multitudes, Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances), one is tri-annual (Socio), one is bi-annual (Tic & Société), and the other three are annual (Revue françaises des SIC, Revue Sciences/Lettres, and Variations). While most of the journals are in the fields of Information and Communication Sciences, some exceptions might raise curiosity. For instance, the journal Critique, founded in 1946 by Georges Bataille, is a journal of general interest, with the orientation slanted towards literary and cultural analysis. Table 2 Summary of 10 thematic issues in 9 journals Issue Title Themes Revue Sciences/Lettres (n°2, 2014) Digital epistemologies of the SSH epistemology, neo-structural sociology, anthropology, digital fictions Tic & Société (vol. 7, n° 2) Digital worlds: new research perspectives digital research, qualitative and quantitative data, ethical issues of digital practices Cahiers du numérique (vol. 10, n° 3) The “delivered” humanities transliteration, transmedia, delivery, network analysis 1 All titles and terms originally in French have been translated by the author. Cahiers du numérique (vol. 10, n° 4) What arrangements for DH? holistic approach, arrangement, digital traces, participative science, social simulation Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances (vol. 8, n° 4) The “delivered” humanities book culture, re-invented reading Socio (n° 4, 2015) The digital turn... and after? digital environment, computational turn, scientific culture, resources Multitudes (n° 59) DH 3.0 DH manifesto, computational subjectivity, computer literacy, media archeology Critique (n° 819-820) Numbers and letters transhumanism, digital materialism, mutations, algorithmic governance Variations (n° 19) Criticism and DH: For a materialistic approach of the “immaterial” scientific production, social simulation, digital breaking, critical theory Revue française des SIC (n° 8) DH and Information and Communication Sciences Uses of dispositif, discourse of the information society, empirical practice of digital, pluridisciplinarity, design turn Cluster Analysis The corpus-based clustering method is used to identify trends, patterns, and the true ecological mechanisms. We aim to illustrate emerging topics and avenues of research and tackle the questions of DH’s disciplinary cohesion that have generated widespread discussion and debate among French academics. Based on the corpus of full-text articles, we extracted word co-occurrence counts over the corpus and mapped all co-occurrences into a two- dimensional cartography using VOSViewer. We then examined cluster networks of the whole corpus (see Fig. 1) and of each journal (see Fig. 2). Fig. 1 shows the co-occurrence term map of all ten thematic issues. A circle represents each term or concept. The circle's diameter and the label size represent the term's frequency. Its proximity to another term indicates the degree of correlation between the two concepts, and its color represents the group to which it conceptually belongs. Because the concepts are spatially interdependent in three-dimensional space and the program is limited to a two- dimensional representation, some relationships cannot be visible. Figure 1 Co-occurrence term map of the whole corpus Figure 2 Term map of Cahiers du numérique (2 issues, 14 articles) All the journals’ term maps contain the main DH cluster (green), reflected by terms such as “humanités numériques," "digital humanities," "social sciences," and associated terms such as “science," “computer science," “research." Regarding different dimensions of DH, Socio and Revue Sciences/Lettres put more emphasis on “research," while Cahiers du Numérique focuses on “digital culture," Variations on "scientific." In case of Critique, terms such as “tool," “treatment," “nature” and “theory” suggest that this journal concerns more with the issues of theoretical computing and algorithm studies. Revue française des SIC presents a sub-group of “design," which reflects the emphasis on the “design turn” of the DH. Table 3 List of clusters with the most frequently used terms Cluster Frequently used terms Cluster 1 (green) scientific, discipline, digital humanities, epistemology, SSH, dialogue, design, academic, researcher, free access, Berry, code, domination, liberation, evolution Cluster 2 (red) web, image, public, MOOC, content, Internet, terrain, actor, site, Google, traffic, Facebook, interaction, emergence, size, ICT, message, review, blog Cluster 3 (yellow) text, book, century, page, article, figure, Rousseau, work, manuscript, Diderot, edition, letter, presentation, word, rhetoric, paper, volume, view, version, composition Cluster 4 (blue) concept, arrangement, medium, Shakespeare, concept, Foucault, archeology, logic, history, resource, condition, society, virtual, theoretical, human, action, meaning, use, norm, perception Cluster 5 (pink) network, center, group, object, measure, class, character, centrality, classification, sentence, novel, hypothesis, value, distance Based on those term maps, we analyze each cluster by looking back the articles that contain the cluster’s most popular keywords, and define the transversal themes of each cluster: 1. Epistemological issues posed by the digital humanities: the role of ICT as a tool to support and enhance interdisciplinary research within the SSH, the making of citizen participation, its community-based and collaborative essence. (Cluster 1) 2. Researchers' re-consideration of the role played by social media and new socio- political relationships, and the practices they make possible (Cluster 2) 3. Digital methods in the humanistic framework: Research and the creation facing the digitization of cultural heritage (Cluster 3) 4. Rethinking of the scientific ecology (Cluster 4) 5. DH’s opportunities to broaden the spectrum of working and exchange languages, and to push the humanities into new territory of collaboration, openness, and experimentation (Cluster 5) In examining the Cluster 1, we see how the digital turn has considerably transformed everyday life, shattering the relationship that individuals have with the world and leading them to reinvent their ways of interacting. The Cluster 2 indicates that the rise of new technologies has also had significant scientific consequences: with the changing conditions of knowledge production and dissemination, the whole relationship to scientific research has been transformed. In the Kuhnian sense of an ontological shift of the positive sciences, the Cluster 5 suggests the humanistic understanding of technology, which consists of the “urgent inquiry into what is human about the computational humanities or social sciences” (Berry, 2011, p. 9). Both the Cluster 3 and 4 reflect on the new knowledge, new uses, new postures and new paradigms that characterize social and human sciences research in the digital age, including the new circulation of knowledge results and the ability of researchers to make the best use of the data produced by these new tools. What is in debates is whether and how the work that digital humanists perform is scholarly and theoretical in scope (Cluster 4). Future Work In this paper, we attempt to trace the emergence of DH through ten thematic issues of French journals. The aim is to map the emerging practices and the dynamics of this phenomenon, in terms of research, knowledge production and knowledge dissemination, and the modalities that allow DH to develop new social and editorial assignments. To achieve the further objective of locating the current state of France research in the international context and move the discussion forward from that point, there is a need for further bibliographic analysis which requires the study of co-citation and co-authorship networks, and the cluster analysis in both networks. The relative lack of internationally co-authored papers in our corpus causes a difficulty to track, analyze and visualize research using citation databases such as LISTA, Scopus or Google Scholar. Efforts must be made to find a modified and French-customized author co-citation analysis method. Bibliography Berry, D. M. (2011). The computational turn: Thinking about the digital humanities. Culture Machine, 12. Retrieved from http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewDownloadInterstitial/440/470. Gold, M. K. (2012). Debates in the digital humanities. Univ of Minnesota Press. Granjon, F., & Magis, C. (2016). Critique et humanités numériques. Variations, (19). Retrieved from http://variations.revues.org/748 Guichard, E. (2013). L’internet et les épistémologies des sciences humaines et sociales. Revue Sciences/Lettres, 2(2). Retrieved from http://rsl.revues.org/389 Kitchin, R. (2014). Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts. Big Data & Society, 1(1), 1–12. Liu, A. (2009). Digital humanities and academic change. English Language Notes. Retrieved from https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/wp-includes/docs/writings/dh-and-academic-change- page-proofs.pdf