Spatial Humanities and Geo-computation for Social Sciences:Advances and Applications

Humanities and Social Sciences(HSS) are undergoing the transformation of spatialization and quantification. Geo-computation, with geoinformatics(including RS: Remote Sensing;GIS: Geographical Information System;GNSS: Global Navigation Satellite System), provides effective computational and spatialization methods and tools for HSS. Spatial Humanities and Geo-computation for Social Sciences(SH&GSS) is a field coupling geo-computation, and geoinformatics, with HSS. This special issue accepted a set of contributions highlighting recent advances in methodologies and applications of SH&GSS, which are related to sentiment spatial analysis from social media data, emotional change spatial analysis from news data, spatial analysis of social media related to COVID-19, crime spatiotemporal analysis, “double evaluation” for Land Use/Land Cover(LUCC), Specially Protected Natural Areas(SPNA) analysis, editing behavior analysis of Volunteered Geographic Information(VGI), electricity consumption anomaly detection, First and Last Mile Problem(FLMP) of public transport, and spatial interaction network analysis for crude oil trade network. Based on these related researches, we aim to present an overview of SH&GSS, and propose some future research directions for SH&HSS.

Mapping Diversity of Publication Patterns in the Social Sciences and Humanities: An Approach Making Use of Fuzzy Cluster Analysis

Purpose: To present a method for systematically mapping diversity of publication patterns at the author level in the social sciences and humanities in terms of publication type, publication language and co-authorship.Design/methodology/approach: In a follow-up to the hard partitioning clustering by Verleysen and Weeren in 2016, we now propose the complementary use of fuzzy cluster analysis, making use of a membership coefficient to study gradual differences between publication styles among authors within a scholarly discipline. The analysis of the probability density function of the membership coefficient allows to assess the distribution of publication styles within and between disciplines.Findings: As an illustration we analyze 1,828 productive authors affiliated in Flanders, Belgium. Whereas a hard partitioning previously identified two broad publication styles, an international one vs. a domestic one, fuzzy analysis now shows gradual differences among authors. Internal diversity also varies across disciplines and can be explained by researchers’ specialization and dissemination strategies.Research limitations: The dataset used is limited to one country for the years 2000–2011; a cognitive classification of authors may yield a different result from the affiliation-based classification used here.Practical implications: Our method is applicable to other bibliometric and research evaluation contexts, especially for the social sciences and humanities in non-Anglophone countries.Originality/value: The method proposed is a novel application of cluster analysis to the field of bibliometrics. Applied to publication patterns at the author level in the social sciences and humanities, for the first time it systematically documents intra-disciplinary diversity.

A Brief Analysis of the relationship between the natural sciences and humanities and social science

With the continuous development of economic and social, the category of science is no longer limited to the technical field, natural science, humanities and social science have flourished, but the study of the relationship between the two disciplines is not perfect enough, so we should follow the academic trend, clarify the relationship between the two,only in this way can we have a more specific grasp of the science, this had a profound influence on the all-round development of modern society.

A quantitative evaluation system of Chinese journals in the humanities and social sciences

Based on analyses on existing indicators for evaluating journals in the humanities and social sciences and our experience in constructing the Chinese Social Science Citation Index(CSSCI), we proposed a comprehensive system for evaluating Chinese academic journals in the humanities and social sciences. This system constitutes 8 primary indicators and 17 sub-indicators for multidisciplinary journals and 19 sub-indicators for discipline-specific journals. Each indicator or sub-indicator is assigned a suitable weight according to its importance in terms of measuring a journal's academic quality and/or impact.

Human Rights Research Methods in Social Science

Introduction and Motivation Legal science and philosophy are two of the most important dis- ciplines in the field of human rights research, both of them assuming different roles and functions in human rights analysis. Scholars can discuss or debate from a philosophical per- spective such as where the ideology of human rights comes from, what the ontology of human rights is and whether people could legitimate human rights claims on the basis of natural morality.

Towards Positivity:A Large-Scale Diachronic Sentiment Analysis of the Humanities and Social Sciences in China

With its rising number of publications and expanding international collaborations,China's humanities and social sciences(HSS)research is displaying its potential for global prominence.Researchers have been exploring the development of China's HSS from different perspectives.However,the examinations from the perspective of sentiment analysis are scanty.Our aim is then to examine the sentiment features in Chinese HSS academic writing,by analyzing a large-scale corpus with over 275 million characters and with a time span from 2000 to 2020.Considering that most studies only focused on abstracts,we examined both the abstracts and the full texts,as well as a direct comparison between them.We found that Chinese HSS academic writing has evolved to be more positively biased in the past two decades,showing an upward trend in the use of positive words and a slight downward trend in the use of negative words.However,the upward trend of positive words in the full texts is not that clear,resembling a fluctuating pattern.Regarding the comparison,the abstracts are more likely to use positive words while the full texts tend to use more negative words.These phenomena can be explained with the social cognitive theory,in that they may be shaped by a joint force of the nature of human beings,the nature of language,the particular socio-cultural background in China and the features of the academic genre.

Reflections on Amendments to the Journal's Editing Standards

A 10-year-old unified editing standard was recently abolished in the field of humanities and social science journals. This is because the standard failed in showing equal respect to disciplinary differences, in keeping with Chinese culturaltraditions, and in gaining acceptance among journal editors. As such, amendment efforts to the National Standard should be undertaken patiently and in a practical manner to achieve agreement within this publishing field.