Page 170 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019

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Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese edition of Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019 169

By focusing on humanities scholars, this paper answers the research questions of how they can
participate in digital humanities and under what conditions they accept digital humanities as a new
research paradigm.
To answer these questions, we conducted multiple case studies. We collected longitudinal data
with semi-structured interviews and observations on eleven typical humanities scholars who have
participated in digital humanities projects with excellent academic performance. We analyzed these
data and secondary data with inductive coding and process analysis techniques. With three-stage
grounded coding, we inductively summarized 18 categories linked together to explain humanities
scholars’ participation in digital humanities. With temporal bracketing and visual mapping, we
analyzed the underlying mechanism of their participation.
We find that humanities scholars have both active and passive motivations to participate in
digital humanities; their motivations co-exist during their participation and can transform from
one to the other. Further, their participation in digital humanities is a three-stage process, namely,
knowing stage, understanding stage, and adopting stage. At each stage, humanities scholars have
shown different information needs and ways of participation, which leads to three typical paths of
participation, namely trial participation with opportunistic motivation, adaptive participation with
active motivation, and stimulated participation motivated by social networks. Each of these paths
can be decomposed into different stages and conditions. Humanities scholars choose their paths
according to different facilitating conditions, as well as individual features. These features include
their motivation, information needs and ways of participation at each stage.
With all findings, we develop a theory on humanities scholars’ participation in digital humanities,
suggesting the necessity of regarding humanities scholars’ participation in digital humanities as a
complex process, rather than an action, because of the uncertain information needs and complex
information behavior of humanities scholars’ in such participation.
Our paper makes contributions to library and information science in two ways. Firstly, we provide
empirical data and a theory to understand a rarely-mentioned type of information behavior, that is,
information behavior in a context of upgrading information technology and caused by uncertain
information needs, complementing to previous studies that mainly focus on information behavior
with certain information needs or specific information technologies. Meanwhile, we further suggest
a process view on such information behavior and offer the three-stage process model to understand
and analyze the behavior. Secondly, we introduce process research into library and information
science. Process research provides theories and methodologies to unfold processes and mechanisms,
which inspire and enable other scholars in our field to conduct research on such topics.
With a special focus on humanities scholars that are the main participants in digital humanities,
but are neglected in previous research, our research also provides insights into digital humanities.
Our research suggests that changing the epistemology of humanities scholars is the key for
digital humanities to significantly affecting the humanities community. Data, technology,
and collaboration are important factors facilitating such changes. However, considering the