The Digital Humanities and Information Science: Remarks on the Epistemologies

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to examine some of the features that appear in the debates around the nature and methodologies of a discipline that is still forming, i.e. the digital humanities, in order to identify what lessons can be learnt by information science from these. The digital humanities have been brought about by the existence of the highly developed information and communication technology infrastructure that provides high bandwidth networks and the capacity to store massive amounts of text. The resulting socio-technological changes are reflected among others by the idea of the computational turn, described and outlined by Berry (2011). This turn is forecasted to be of influence for the digital humanities and the social sciences. The growing importance of data in research and other fields also roots in this thinking. The epistemology of information science has been characterized by a number of turns, and may be influenced by the computing turn. The future of these disciplines is inextricably linked to the future of the document, as text remains to be a main object of investigation for the digital humanities, while texts also can be interpreted as data, while emerging approaches can stimulate thinking on the nature of the epistemologies of librarianship, information science and the digital humanities.

Keywords: Digital Humanities, ICT, Information Science, Cognitive Structures, Information Architecture

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