Transdisciplinarity and digital humanities : lessons learned from developing text-mining tools for textual analysis

The development and implementation of e-Research tools have signified and signalled a dramatic "computational turn" in conducting research in humanities. Digital humanities has been heralded as the future of humanities research. e-Research programmes often emphasise interdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary. Although to some extent these existing observations are valid, I will argue in this paper that the kind of digital humanities facilitated by e-Research tools, if widely adopted, is in fact transdisciplinary, a step further than multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary. The realisation of transdisciplinary research can be seen through looking at the process of developing text-mining tools for social and behavioural scientists in the case study to be introduced in this paper. I will discuss the challenges and implications of such transdisciplinary research in light of this case study. The empirical case study provided here also contributes to the ongoing and long-standing discussion about interdisciplinariy and transdisciplinarity