Conceptual Forays: A Corpus-based Study of “Theory” in Digital Humanities Journals

The status of theory in the Digital Humanities (DH) has been the subject of much debate. As a result, we find different theory narratives competing and entangled with each other. If at all, these narratives can only be grasped and examined from a somewhat detached perspective. Here, we attempt to investigate these elusive narratives by means of a conceptual history approach. In doing so, we define different theory dimensions, ranging from specific cultural and literary theory frameworks to more generic uses of the concept of theory. We examine the use and semantic changes of these theory notions in a large corpus of DH journals. Using a mixture of heuristic methods and approaches from the field of distributional semantics, we aim to create tellable conceptual stories of DH theory.