Abstract:
The increasing accessibility and affordability of services and computational resources to collect, enhance, analyze and republish data continues to impact and increase the structuring of many fields of scholarship. With more Cultural Heritage (CH) and humanities datasets available than ever, Digital Humanities (DH) brings together an exciting blend of researchers and practitioners from different disciplines, such as social sciences, arts, humanities, cultural heritage, library science, and computer science. This highly interdisciplinary community brings promising visions of our digital pasts and futures, but also humanistic and cultural concerns about their use. Data management, data ethics, data curation, data cleaning, data provenance, data integration, and semantics are prevalent in DH from idiosyncratic and varied perspectives. Semantic technologies have shown, in various venues through the last decade, a key role and deep penetration in cultural heritage and DH workflows through unique methods, adoption stories, and contributions to a harmonic ecosystem for Semantic data-intensive technologies. On the one hand, semantic technologies have effectively addressed challenges and research questions from humanities scholars, such as working with data of limited scale, vague and yet valuable evidence, and the need for richer contexts. On the other hand, humanities scholars are continuously given a new technological landscape to reflect on and develop new thoughts, closing a virtuous circle. This editorial discusses the motivations behind the proposal and publication of this special issue along with the statistics as well as the topics of the submitted and accepted papers.