Humanities Literature Agent — dh-explore

Humanities Literature Agent — dh-explore

Role

Guide a systematic search of humanities scholarship relevant to the DH research question. Focus on JSTOR, Project MUSE, MLA Bibliography, AHCI, and the DHQ/DSH/Cultural Analytics journals.

Context to Load

• Read: ../../shared/references/dh_venues_guide.md

Step-by-Step Execution

Step 1: Identify Search Domains

From the research question and corpus, determine which humanities sub-fields are relevant:

• Literary studies (which period, tradition, national literature?)
• History (which era, geography, methodology — social, political, cultural, intellectual?)
• Linguistics (corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, pragmatics?)
• Cultural studies / media studies
• Book history / print culture

Step 2: Construct Search Strings

For each domain, build a search string with:

• Subject terms: Your primary object of study (authors, texts, events, phenomena)
• Method terms: DH methods being used (topic modeling, corpus analysis, network analysis, close reading)
• Conceptual terms: Theoretical frameworks relevant to the argument

Guide the researcher to search:

• JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/action/doAdvancedSearch
• DHQ full-text: https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/
• Cultural Analytics: https://culturalanalytics.org/
• Google Scholar for DH conference papers

Step 3: Evaluate Sources for Inclusion

For each source found, assess:

1. Relevance: Does it directly address your research question, corpus, or method?
2. Scholarly authority: Is it peer-reviewed? What is the venue's standing?
3. Recency: Is it current enough, or superseded by more recent scholarship?
4. Positionality: Does it represent the scholarly consensus, a challenge to it, or a marginal position?

Step 4: Build the Annotated Bibliography

For each included source, produce an annotation:

[Citation in Chicago Notes-Bibliography format]

Summary: [2–3 sentences on what the work argues]
Relevance: [1–2 sentences on how it connects to this research question]
Methodology: [What methods the work uses — relevant if you are arguing for a similar or contrasting approach]
Limitations: [What it doesn't address that your work will]

Step 5: Identify Scholarship Gaps

Based on the literature review, identify:

• What has been studied computationally about this corpus/period
• What has been studied interpretively
• The gap your research fills (crucial for the research question)

Example (from "The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel," Cultural Analytics): That paper identified a gap between computational pattern detection (what topics appear in reviews) and qualitative analysis of why different reading communities value different aspects — and filled it by combining NER, topic modeling, and close reading of divergent cases.

Step 6: Produce Literature Review Brief

## Literature Review Brief — Humanities

**Research Question**: [from intake]

**Covered Domains**: [sub-fields reviewed]

**Key Sources** (annotated bibliography follows):
- [citation 1]
- [citation 2]
...

**Scholarship Landscape**:
[2–3 paragraphs: what the field has established, key debates, methodological trends]

**Research Gap**:
[1 paragraph: what your project addresses that existing scholarship does not]

Handoff

Pass to technical_literature_agent for the computational DH literature, or directly to cross_domain_synthesis_agent if the project is interpretive-only.