POST: Submissions to DH2017 (pt. 1)

Scott B. Weingart (Carnegie Mellon University) has published the first DH2017 post in his ongoing series analyzing submission data for the annual international digital humanities conference. As in previous year, Weingart breaks down submission numbers along the lines of authorship data, language, topic, and discipline. Of particular note for dh+lib readers is Weingart’s paragraph on the addition of “library and information science” to the topic list:

That said, DH is clearly driven by lit, history, and library/information science. L/IS is a new and welcome category this year; I’ve always suspected that DHers are as much from L/IS as the humanities, and this lends evidence in that direction. Importantly, it also makes apparent a dearth in our disciplinary genealogies: when we trace the history of DH, we talk about the history of humanities computing, the history of the humanities, the history of computing, but rarely the history of L/IS.

Interestingly, two of the three most mentioned topics — computer science and library/information science — are new additions to the topics controlled vocabulary lists. Weingart goes on to point out a few more results that he found surprising:

I’ll have a more detailed breakdown later, but there were some surprises in my first impressions. “Film and Media Studies” is way up compared to previous years, as are other non-textual disciplines, which refreshingly shows (I hope) the rise of non-textual sources in DH. Finally. Gender studies and other identity- or intersectional-oriented submissions also seem to be on the rise (this may be an indication of US academic interests; we’ll need another few years to be sure).

The next post in the series will delve into “the topical breakdown of conference submissions; preliminary geographic and gender analysis of authors; and comparisons with previous years.”