Coordinators Foreword

Abstract

As editors of Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Digitalia, we are proud to announce the publication of the first issue of Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Digitalia, the first Romanian academic journal dedicated entirely to the Digital Humanities research and practice. The main aims of Studia UBB Digitalia are motivating and promoting the research in the interdisciplinary field of Digital Humanities, especially in Europe, in general, and Romania, in particular. Publishing a new journal on Digital Humanities is indeed an audacity, given that the field is still seen, after decades of evolution, as an odd hybrid between seemingly incompatible realms of scientific endeavour. Bridging this apparent dichotomy has been the focus of many researchers in both the humanities and the computer sciences for the past 50 years, but still the boundaries between the realms exist and grow strong, especially in the institutional practice of universities. Trying to break this barrier proves to be even more harder in Romania, where the classification of “traditional” fields of scientific research dictate the distribution of research funds and the evaluation process of research output. Chances are, if an historian publishes an article on his research using computational methods in a journal for computer sciences, that his or her results cannot be “capitalised” in his own field; likewise, computer scientists may see their work in Digital Humanities not accounted for, if published elsewhere than in well-known CS journals. Studia UBB Digitalia aims to give researchers from all fields the chance to get their results published, recognized and valued, at the same time proving that “interdisciplinarity” is not just a fancy term, but already the reality of cutting-edge research in all the fields.