Digital Humanities: organizational forms and infrastructure research

Modern information environment imposes new requirements on the system of the humanitarian knowledge and has a significant impact on the humanities, providing scientists with ample opportunities for cooperation, opening a whole range of new research methods. The article examines Digital Humanities as one of the promising directions of development of the humanities in the digital age. Digital humanities development clearly shows that computerization helps new synthesis of humanities and natural sciences, helps to overcome their alienation from each other. Digital Humanities are considered in the project as an interdisciplinary field of research that combines methods and practice of humanitarian, social and computational sciences to explore the possibilities of the application and interpretation of new digital and information-communicational technologies in the humanities and education. The article presents the results of the analysis of the 323 world centers of Digital Humanities identified during the study. The analysis revealed the organizational forms of research and education centers working in Digital Humanities, defined the infrastructure of research in the field of Digital Humanities at the world’s leading centers, localized these centers on the world map. Most of the structures support interdisciplinary research in their university, promote the use of digital technologies in humanities research, advise and provide technical assistance to the humanities, regularly conduct seminars and workshops on the topics of Digital Humanities. This is reflected in the organizational forms: a significant part of research and educational institutions working in the field of Digital Humanities are represented by the modern form typical of the organizational structure of interdisciplinary research: centers, laboratories, groups, schools and others. Applied methods of Digital Humanities are used as a model to represent the results. The description for each Digital Humanities Center includes its name, a brief description of the activity, creation date, address, manager’s name and contacts, a link to the site. The purpose and basic tools for creating interactive maps “World Centers of Digital Humanities”, methods of result presentation in Google Maps Engine, difficulties arising in the course of work and ways to overcome them are described. The results of the research allow to determine the place of Digital Humanities among numerous options of identification of humanities developing in the conditions of information society and / or on the basis of ICT (e-Humanities, e-Science, e-History, humanitarian informatics, etc.). This article is written with the support of RGNF grant no. 14-03-00659 “Humanities in the Digital Age: From Branch Informatics to Digital Humanities”.

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