The convergence of researchers from the fields of the humanities and social sciences with computer scientists has resulted in a new interdisciplinary field called digital humanities.\u00a0 It is a give-and-take kind of relationship: social scientists contemplate immense social and economic databases or digitization of artistic and historical collections that have expanded research fronts while computer scientists face the challenge of designing tools to meet such needs.\u00a0 Another aspect of this field is the study of the role of digital technology in society.<\/p>\n
This issue\u2019s cover story<\/a>\u00a0shows how researchers have incorporated the tools and concepts from other fields into their own activities.\u00a0 One example of the use of so-called Big Data in humanities research involves the organization of records about slave ship voyages during the days of slavery, which has allowed the emergence of a more comprehensive portrait of the slave trade. The efforts to organize databases and design new tools are as impressive as the findings of the research studies themselves: for 30 years, the consortium behind the Text Encoding Initiative has developed and maintained a standard for encoding texts in digital format, in other words, enabling documents to be read by machines–an achievement that has had an impact on fields such as linguistics.<\/p>\n It was by analyzing a database of nearly 34,000 entries that a group of paleontologists from the University of Cambridge and London\u2019s Natural History Museum presented a controversial proposal to reclassify the known lineages of dinosaurs.\u00a0 They analyzed 457 anatomical traits of 74 species of dinosaurs and the reptiles that preceded them.\u00a0 The report on page 40 presents the suggested new classification, which changes the relationships and the degree of kinship between the principal lineages of those prehistoric animals. \u00a0Now it\u2019s time to follow the debate to find out if the proposal will overcome the skepticism of the community as it undergoes scientific scrutiny on the part of its peers.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n