Page 145 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.47, 2021

144 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.13, 2021

participants (the field of library, information and archives that has been actively promoting and
leading it), skeptics (initially the humanities field did not embrace it) and spectators (most people
considered it just a tool, a more advanced tool than document digitization). With the increase
of digital humanities projects and results, academic results beyond traditional research methods
have been produced in the fields of humanities such as language, literature, history and art. The
evaluation of digital humanities is the process of attaching additional value to digital humanities
projects or results. It breaks through the traditional single-line or linear evaluation based on
journals and quantity, and empowers and values the development of digital humanities from a
multidimensional and composite perspective. At the same time, in the development of digital
humanities from the intermediate stage to the advanced stage, it is necessary to standardize
relevant research and results on the basis of the construction of the digital humanities evaluation
system, and guide the healthy development of digital humanities. As a result, the evaluation of
digital humanities has begun to draw attention from the academic community and has increasingly
become a new topic in the field of practice and research.
Does digital humanities require a different evaluation system from traditional academia? How
to authenticate the diverse forms of results based on the atypical practice of digital humanities
research results? How can we have a fair and objective understanding of interdisciplinary results?
From the perspective of the development stages, the answers to these questions are conducive to
[9]
promoting the standardization and scientificity of digital humanities . The three core elements
and three development stages of digital humanities have been analyzed, and the evaluation of
its results can also be based on the three core elements (see Table 1). Given that the evaluation
focus of digital humanities varies at different stages and the indicator system needs sufficient
flexibility to encompass all forms of digital humanities results as much as possible, this article
mainly provides a dimension or direction for evaluation. It is hoped that the academic community
could pay attention to the theoretical research of digital humanities evaluation and build a more
comprehensive indicator system.

2.1 Discipline: core element

Discipline is the core element of digital humanities practice and research, as well as the core
element of evaluation. The evaluation of a digital humanities result depends on whether it has
expanded the research field of humanities, promoted the theoretical innovation, knowledge
innovation and academic innovation in the humanities, and thus promoted the interdisciplinary
integration of humanities [10] . The evaluation of discipline, that is, the evaluation of various
dimensions of the discipline’s professional field, must be fully participated and recognized by
humanities scholars. The evaluation of digital humanities can be carried out from five aspects:
thinking system, resource integration, data interpretation, interdisciplinary innovation, and
recognition of academic results.