Works on My Machine': A Case Study of Replicability Challenges in Computational Humanities Research
Viktor J. Illmer – 2025
The replicability of computational research is often stated as a key concern in digital humanities scholarship, yet its practical realisation frequently encounters limitations. This contribution analyses some technical conditions for the replicability of articles in the 2024 Computational Humanities Research conference proceedings. A survey was conducted to determine the stated availability of source code, the programming languages employed, and whether and in which way dependencies were declared. The results show that a majority of contributions were not able to make their source code available. Among those that did provide code, many supplied insufficient information on software dependencies to reproduce their computational environments. This circumstance sheds light on infrastructural challenges that complicate the replication of results and, by extension, the review and reuse of these works.
Viktor J. Illmer. "'Works on My Machine': A Case Study of Replicability Challenges in Computational Humanities Research." In Anthology of Computers and the Humanities 3: Computational Humanities Research 2025 (= The Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference, Held at C²DH – Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg, December 9–12, 2025), edited by Taylor Arnold, Margherita Fantoli, and Ruben Ros, 142–48. Luxembourg: Association for Computers and the Humanities, 2025. https://doi.org://10.63744/iAqEoznkfKuz.
