A Comparative Corpus Study of Epistemic Culture and Discourse in Computer Science, the Humanities, and the Digital Humanities

Abstract

This article advances understanding of the interdisciplinary components of the digital humanities, and how this hybrid field relates to some of its contributing epistemic traditions. It builds its approach by drawing upon recent empirical work on the values expressed within AI research, extending from that work’s focus on justificatory chains in computer science scholarship to explore these and related discursive strategies in a comparative, computational context across corpora drawn from computer science, traditional and digital humanities. It also looks at how these different disciplines position themselves epistemically, agentially and discursively. In this way, the paper presents a comparative perspective on the values and approaches, in particular, the divergences among these fields, and points toward some of the specific areas needing to be addressed if they are to work more productively together in the development toward more socially and culturally integrated engineering practices.