Digital Humanities 2023 Revisiting connotations of digital humanists: Exploration based on semi- structured interviews and survey Ma, Rongqian rm56@iu.edu Indiana University Bloomington, United States of America Introduction This poster revisits the connotations of the umbrella term “digi- tal humanists” by positioning it in the rapidly developing field of digital humanities (DH). The wide participation in DH from scho- lars, researchers, and practitioners coming from various know- ledge domains and fields (Ma & Li, 2021; Jänicke, 2016) provides a good opportunity to rethink if advances in digital technologies and cross-field collaboration practices have impacted research communities’ collective understandings of “digital humanists,” including what the term refers to and how the term shapes the dy- namics of the DH field. Particularly, in this poster, I explore the reasons why and why not a researcher would self-identify as a di- gital humanist. Related Work Who is and who is not a digital humanist is a classic question in DH research literature? Early deliberations of “digital humanists” have emphasized the humanist orientation for the term. Alvarado (2012) discussed that a “digital humanist” should be someone who (1) aims to develop the deep domain knowledge of the traditio- nal humanist, (2) learns a wide variety of technologies and pro- gramming languages, and (3) critically situates the technologies as cultural artifacts participating in the production of social and co- gnitive structures. This demonstrates that a “digital humanist,” to Alvarado’s imagination, should be a versatile researcher who both has deep knowledge of humanities research and a great mastery of digital technologies and programming. Ramsay (2011) at the same time situates “digital humanists” as humanities scholars who “can build something with digital methods.” This understanding has a broader stance on what is included in “digital methods” and does not emphasize digital humanists’ abilities to write codes or pro- grams. Despite the different ideas about digital humanists’ tech- nological literacy and programming proficiency, early understan- dings of the term suggest the main component of DH workforce and labor landscape were humanities researchers. However, as di- sciplinary boundaries blur and converge, interdisciplinary colla- borations deepen, and an increasing number of scholars from non- humanities fields enter the DH landscape (Wang, 2018; Tang et al., 2017), it becomes a meaningful moment to revisit the collec- tive perceptions of “digital humanists” in the current DH land- scape. Questions and Methods Situated in this background, I ask: Why or why not does a rese- archer or practitioner self-identify as a digital humanist? By means of answering this question, I discuss what the current perceptions of a “digital humanist” among DH research communities are, whe- ther they are different from early connotations, and how they are potentially affected by the current work practices and labor struc- ture of DH. Methodologically, I use a combination of qualitative semi-structured interviews and quantitative survey methods to ex- plore the research question. For the preliminary study, I recruited fourteen participants who have been actively engaged in DH re- search projects for 30-minute semi-structured interviews. During the interviews, I collected participants’ demographic information, particularly their fields of research, academic positions, and the major research questions they explore in their work. I also asked participants to indicate if they self-identify as digital humanists, based on their respective understandings of the term, and explain why. Preliminary results showed that researchers’ self-identifica- tion varies, and such variance is impacted by the nature of rese- arch questions and researchers’ self-evaluation of their digital li- teracy. In the following survey, I will test the above observations with larger datasets. I explore which components of digital liter- acy matter the most for researchers’ self-identification as digital humanists, which types of research questions ground their deci- sions and their sense of belonging, and how they make sense of the highly interdisciplinary field of practice and critically think of themselves as (or not as) part of it. Findings of this study will help us better understand the connotations of “digital humanists” as of today and the construction of collective identities of DH resear- chers and practitioners. 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