Digital humanities and library and information cultures: a model for analysis, evaluation, interpretation

Abstract

This contribution focuses on the analysis and interpretation of disciplinary relationships between Digital Humanities and the fields of bibliography, documentation, library and information science. After a discussion of the term and concept of ‘discipline’, some characteristics of the research’s subject fields are examined, and then their points of intersection and contact are examined and compared. The final paragraph, after summarizing the results of the analysis of the literature used, proposes some general considerations, which mainly concern a possible interpretative, panoramic and holistic attitude, referring to the digital mutation in progress. The need for a convincingly transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological perspective is shown, which is able to move in a balanced and conscious way between the breadth of cultural and media studies, philosophy’s theoretical rigor, history’s longue durée, all necessary to understand the elements of novelty, especially anthropological, distributed in the infosphere. The goal is to foster the overcoming of the disturbing perception (weirdness) that the effects of the computational power of machines generate, and to define the basic conditions for new libraries, librarians, library sciences, capable of interpreting the tensions of the post-human Anthropocene.