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abstract: The collaborative aspect of digital humanities is one of the core values of the field. Specialists and organizations involved in digital humanities partnerships may include individual scholars focusing on a particular area, multiple scholars across disciplines, computer scientists, or digital humanities centers. Through a quantitative analysis of authorship in international digital humanities journals, this article demonstrates that libraries also have unique advantages that make them well positioned to contribute to digital humanities.
Introduction
The collaborative aspect of digital humanities is one of the core values of the field. Collaborative approaches can draw on the strengths and expertise of various specialists, thus bringing out the full potential of a research program and producing larger and longer-lasting impacts. Specialists and organizations involved in digital humanities partnerships may include individual scholars focusing on a particular area, multiple scholars across disciplines, computer scientists, and digital humanities centers. Many information science scholars and librarians have noted that libraries have an important role to play in digital humanities. Their arguments are usually taken from a theoretical or case study approach; the literature review will summarize several of these arguments. Nevertheless, the question remains, could libraries serve as one of the core contributors to the development of digital humanities? This article will try to answer that question through an authorship study of five international journals. New insights into the structural advantages of libraries will provide additional evidence encouraging librarians worldwide to embrace this new calling.
Literature Review
A substantia! amount of literature emphasizes the importance of libraries in digital humanities and shares insights into how to further strengthen this interdisciplinary collaboration. Since previous studies have already cited and reviewed many older publications, the current literature review will focus on more recent publications to avoid duplication and to capture the latest ideas and arguments.
Micah Vandegrift and Stewart Varner suggest an interesting connection between the humanities and libraries: "They are tasked with collecting, organizing and preserving our shared, collective memory . . . They are also both experiencing an extremely challenging historical moment where external critics are questioning their value."1 The authors further comment that libraries have inherent strengths that can "mirror and complement the needs at the core of the digital humanities," making digital humanities and libraries "natural partners." This...