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028 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.9, 2017

(Takeyuki, 2016). In consequence, new methods of observing are required. As the development of
data processing as well as simulation and restoration by image technology, digital humanities come
into being. Digital Humanities are neither pure digital nor pure human research. It is cooperation
between librarians and human researchers. Digitalization changes spatial and temporal pattern.
People can converse with the ancients and forecast the future by means of big data. Some research
indicates that the first wave of digital humanities work is quantitative in terms of the database’s
search and retrieval and the second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive,
generative in character (“The digital humanities manifesto 2.0”, 2017).
In general, digital humanities have made progress in the following aspects. Firstly, the research
goes deep into content from form. Materials collected in libraries are mainly historical textual
materials. The ancients had gained significant results in bibliography, textual criticism and
bibliology. However, these studies were limited to historical materials itself. Modern technologies,
especially digital technologies are able to explore backgrounds of content and historical materials,
providing the possibilities of explaining and restoring the history. Secondly, the research object
changes from textual materials to materials of multiple forms. Distinguishing textual forgery
to doubting antiquity was proposed earlier, but it was only based on texts because of the lack
of technological tools. Nowadays we are able to make use of modern technologies to explore
historical textual materials from different disciplines and perspectives. We can learn the method of
Bauforschung which was invented by Armin von Gerkan in the 1920s. It reconstructs knowledge
of history by cultural technologies, manufacturing flow, context and the initiatives of knowledge.
Some called it historical criticism of architectural history (Jiang, 2015). Thirdly, the research
develops from one discipline to multiple disciplines. In 2014 Shanghai Archives and Duke
University jointly held Photographic Exhibition of Chinese Folk Customs at the Beginning of 21st
Century. Besides the original works, the exhibition also showed some research results. The original
resources were made open access by Duke University. Researchers were asked to observe what
was behind the photographs from the perspectives of cultural anthropology and social science.
For example, audience was impressed by one scholar’s research on the photographs applying
Studium and Punctum of Roland Barthes. Libraries are weak in non-textual historical research. It
is necessary to learn the results of other disciplines. Hence, libraries should learn to cooperate with
humanists and experts of geography and other disciplines.
As the progress of ICT, collaborating with human research institutions, some overseas libraries
and archives make advantage of digital humanities to research on historical materials. For instance,
reproducing historical scenes by digital technologies and restudying historical geography by GPS
become new means to exploit historical materials. Digital humanities should attach importance to
three aspects. For the first place digital humanities research should pay attention to preservation,
exploitation and open access of primary source. The priority and precondition of digital humanities
research is to exploit original data, thus preservation should be stressed. At the same time original
data should be open access so that researchers of other disciplines can access these materials and