Keywords
digital humanities
research infrastructure
natural language processing (NLP)
information extraction
How to Cite
Abstract
The article examines digital transformation in the humanities by analysing software mentions in scholarly publications using the Softcite tool. A longitudinal dataset comprising journals in traditional linguistics and literary studies (TLL) as well as digital humanities (DH) was compiled, and software mentions were manually validated on a per-document basis. The results reveal a clear upward trend in software use across both domains, with DH journals consistently exhibiting much higher levels of software saturation, while only selected linguistics journals show notable growth in TLL. The study reveals substantial false-positive rates, especially in DH, and confirms that abstracts rarely contain software references. It also demonstrates that automated software detection can support research infrastructures in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), though effective implementation requires human validation and may be strengthened through integration with curated software catalogues such as the SSH Open Marketplace.
Funding
This article was written as part of the research project “Making Software FAIR: A machine-assisted workflow for the research software lifecycle” (CHIST-ERA-22-ORD-08), co-funded by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki (National Science Center), project number 2022/04/Y/HS2/00182. For the purposes of Open Access, the author has applied a CC-BY licence to the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) resulting from this submission
References
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License
Copyright (c) 2026 Tomasz Umerle, Renata Rokicka, Patryk Hubar-Kołodziejczyk, Cezary Rosiński , Katarzyna Jarzyńska
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.