RESEARCH ARTICLE Digital humanities as a cross-disciplinary battleground: An examination of inscriptions in journal publications Rongqian Ma 1 | Kai Li 2 1 School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 2 School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China Correspondence Kai Li, School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China, 59 Zhongguancun St, Haidian District, 100872 Beijing, China. Email: kai.li@ruc.edu.cn Funding information Institute of Museum and Library Services, Grant/Award Number: RE-70-17-0094-17 Abstract Inscriptions are defined as traces of scientific research production that are embodied in material artifacts and media, which encompass a wide variety of nonverbal forms such as graphs, diagrams, and tables. Inscription serves as a fundamental rhetorical device in research outputs and practices. As many inscriptions are deeply rooted in a scientific research paradigm, they can be used to evaluate the level of scientificity of a scientific field. This is specifically helpful to understand the relationships between research traditions in digital humanities (DH), a highly cross-disciplinary between various humanities and scientific traditions. This paper presents a quantitative, community-focused examination of how inscriptions are used in English-language research articles in DH journals. We randomly selected 252 articles published between 2011 and 2020 from a representative DH journal list, and manually classified the inscriptions and author domains in these publications. We found that inscrip- tions have been increasingly used during the past decade, and their uses are more intensive in publications led by STEM authors comparing to other domains. This study offers a timely survey of the disciplinary landscape of DH from the perspective of inscriptions and sheds light on how different research approaches collaborate and combat in the field of DH. 1 | INTRODUCTION The development of digital humanities (DH) has long been regarded as a “battleground” between various research domains and conventions, especially the humanities traditions and those from the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields. The com- putational turn in the humanities offered new research opportunities while also ignited competing attitudes toward digital methods and technologies (Berry, 2012), creating tensions within the “Big Tent DH” (Svensson, 2010, 2012). Proponents argued for the enabling effects of digital technologies and methods on transforming humanities scholarly practices to better identify and address research problems (Gold, 2012; Gold, & Klein, 2019), while disputes accused those methods of disrupting the disciplinary identities of the humanities. The increasing presence of STEM researchers, as well as scholars of various domains in the field, has also posed challenges to cross-field DH collabo- rations (Edmond, 2016; Flanders, 2016), making it increasingly important to investigate ways to achieve more in-depth, effective collaborations among DH com- munities. Faced with such challenges, inscriptions, the nonverbal knowledge representations that have been widely used in STEM disciplines as a research device, such as graphs, tables, and equations, demonstrate to be a potential index to explore the existing tension and accompanied opportunities of humanities–STEM collabo- rations in the DH field. Although the concept of inscriptions only started to receive scholarly attention recently in DH Received: 15 January 2021 Revised: 10 May 2021 Accepted: 30 May 2021 DOI: 10.1002/asi.24534 J Assoc Inf Sci Technol. 2021;1–16. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/asi © 2021 Association for Information Science and Technology. 1