Digital humanities methods as a gateway to inter and transdisciplinarity

Advances in digital methods not only allow the application of quantitative methods to new problems but also offer new possibilities for collaborative qualitative research. This permits us to look again at the ‘two cultures’ of scientific and humanities research as an interdisciplinary continuum of methods rather than as opposites. DInformed by teaching digital research methods courses in history, politics, international relations and digital humanities at undergraduate and graduate level over the past 30 years, this paper draws on Unsworth’s idea of ‘Scholarly primitives’ sand the ideas of Willard McCarthy to suggests that a range of methods provide the basic ingredients on which a variety of disciplinary perspectives are built. Thus an integrated perspective can flow from tools and methods upwards to epistemology and ontology in research-based learning. This allows us to equip our students to use a range of common research tools which may be applied across disciplines, while at the same time making them more aware of higher order differences in disciplinary perspectives.