Hist Psychol. 2018 Nov;21(4):380-383. doi: 10.1037/hop0000113.

ABSTRACT

The commentaries by Baldwin (2018), Green (2018), and Porter (2018) on the 2 articles (Burman, 2018; Flis & Van Eck, 2018) in this special section provide a unique perspective on digital humanities approaches to history of psychology. Each of the commentators approached the topic through their own lens-Melinda Baldwin as a historian of scientific journals, Christopher Green as a pioneer in digital history of psychology, and Ted Porter as a historian of quantification. In my response, I tried to reply to the 3 comments by critically discussing 4 themes the special section has raised: the relationship between digital history and conventional history, the perspective that takes databases as both sources for historians and objects in history, the relationship between "thick descriptions" and "thin" digital ones, and finally, the role of digital history as a type of a "trading creole" between scientists working in quantified disciplines like scientific psychology and less quantified ones like history. I think the commentators have rightly observed some pitfalls in the uncritical application of digital history. On the other hand, in my response, I argue that the careful use of digital methods, where the user stays in communication with nondigital historians, opens new perspectives for historians of science, historians of psychology, and psychologists themselves. Digital methods are not there to supplant historicist work but to add to it and translate it to new audiences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:30421950 | DOI:10.1037/hop0000113

Hist Psychol. 2018 Nov;21(4):334-362. doi: 10.1037/hop0000067. Epub 2017 Jul 20.

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the structure of psychological literature as represented by a corpus of 676,393 articles in the period from 1950 to 1999. The corpus was extracted from 1,269 journals indexed by PsycINFO. The data in our analysis consisted of the relevant terms mined from the titles and abstracts of all of the articles in the corpus. Based on the co-occurrences of these terms, we developed a series of chronological visualizations using a bibliometric software tool called VOSviewer. These visualizations produced a stable structure through the 5 decades under analysis, and this structure was analyzed as a data-mined proxy for the disciplinary formation of scientific psychology in the second part of the 20th century. Considering the stable structure uncovered by our term co-occurrence analysis and its visualization, we discuss it in the context of Lee Cronbach's "Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology" (1957) and conventional history of 20th-century psychology's disciplinary formation and history of methods. Our aim was to provide a comprehensive digital humanities perspective on the large-scale structural development of research in English-language psychology from 1950 to 1999. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:28726441 | DOI:10.1037/hop0000067

Isis. 2016 Jun;107(2):346-8. doi: 10.1086/687221.

NO ABSTRACT

PMID:27439297 | DOI:10.1086/687221