DARIAH2020 | Zagreb, Croatia 
 

Insights on scholarly primitives from Digital Humanities research in 

Spain 

Authors: M. Toscano, A. Rabadán Reyes, S. Ros Muñoz, E. González-Blanco 

García. 

 

Abstract: 

Digital Humanities are experiencing a growing interest in Spain, especially in the last 

decade, becoming a leading trend in research, either as a field of study or as a preferential 

financing topic. At the same time, because of their novelty, they are under scrutiny by the 

research community and government institutions because the return of investment is not 

understood neither the role that Spanish researchers can play within European-wide 

research infrastructures, such as DARIAH. 

In order to provide the global community of scholars working in this field with a 

greater understanding of the current Spanish scenario, LINHD has recently promoted a 

research on the evolution of Digital Humanities in Spain in the last 25 years, a timeframe 

comparable with Unsworth first formulation of scholarly primitives. The immediate goals 

of the study were to identify researchers in the field of Digital Humanities and to explore 

their financing, institutional affiliations, research projects and developed resources. The 

research has been very much data oriented and quantitative at its core, in order to quantify 

and describe initiatives, researchers, projects, digital resources, educational courses and 

scientific publications, connected among themselves and spanning from the nineties to 

the latest contributions. From a quantitative point of view, we collected bibliographical 

records from over 400 authors, that represent a good approximation of the available 

literature produced by researchers affiliated with Spanish institutions and a quantifiable 

measure of the impact and interest in DH within the Spanish research community in the 

Humanities. More than 360 projects have been mapped, generally small from the point 

of view of economic resources, but that together represent a significant amount of 

research funds dedicated, in the last twenty years and by a variety of public and private 

funding bodies, to research in this field (over 20 million euros). Finally, a dozen 

educational courses and over 80 digital resources of diverse nature (repositories of 

documents, collections of artefacts, crowdsourcing platforms, dictionaries, etc.) have 

been analyzed, the latter, most of the time, produced with the aim to publish a service to 

improve the basic of day-to-day research in the Humanities. 

In the context of this contribution, we plan to explore and exploit this relatively 

vast amount of data in order to identify how the introduction of digital tools and methods 

from Computer Science has affected the basic functions of research in the Humanities in 

Spain. Among the types of records collected, we believe that digital resources in 

particular will be able to provide insights, because they speak more about the reality of 

research workflows. To perform this analysis, resources will be classified and described 

according to classical scholarly primitives (discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, 

sampling, illustrating and representing), in order to highlight presences, absence and 

recurring associations of these categories, at certain specific stages and over time. 



Additionally, being resources already classified by discipline (Philology, History, 

Archaeology, History of Arts, …) and typology, we will be able to visualize the 

relationships between scholarly primitives and other dimensions in our data. This 

taxonomy exercise will also provide an opportunity to reflect about the need for new 

possible classifications, and on how classical primitives can assume different meanings 

depending on the scope of a project. 

We think that the poster format will better suit this presentation, as it will offer 

opportunities to exchange ideas one-on-one with attendees and stimulate conversations. 

 

 


	DARIAH2020 | Zagreb, Croatia