Abstract: [Purpose/Significance] Evidence-based approach has become an important research paradigm in such social research fields as management, education, economy, and law. In the research of digital humanities, how to obtain and process evidence from the original literature in order to effectively solve research problems is an important research topic. [Method/Process] This paper took the hierarchical social cognition theory as the theoretical basis for the evidence integration process of digital humanities research. From this perspective, the present research uses the theory of ecosystem for reference to integrate levels of evidence, the forms of evidence, evidences' carrier, information organization and the difference ways in which digital humanities researchers analyze the evidence as the same framework to shed light on the whole landscape of evidence-based digital humanities research. Furthermore, this study summarized the key value of evidence-based digital humanities research as to improve the validity of the evidence based on the research design theory and cognition theory. Due to the academic tradition of mutual verification between literature and history in digital humanities research, this paper also combined different evidence sources as different matrixes to integrate the evidence to demonstrate the specific evidence integration types of evidence-based digital humanities research. Based on the above research procedures, this paper also proposed a roadmap for future evidence-based digital humanities researchers to conduct more evidence synthesis related research from the perspective of integrating knowledge-based evidence and relational evidence. [Results/Conclusions] We put forward a hierarchical structure framework of the evidence-based digital humanities research ecosystem. Original evidence, initial processing evidence, secondary processing evidence, third processing evidence and the comprehensive evidence formulated five levels of this framework with a structure from the low level to the high level. Based on above theoretical framework, we concluded that coordination with validity and cognition as the theoretical motivation of the evidence integration in evidence-based digital humanities research. Systematic review and information organization are regarded as two instruments for evidence integration and the multiple mutual confirmation of various types of initial or secondary evidence is regarded as the practical tendency of evidence integration process in the evidence-based digital humanities research. Specifically, this research summarized two mutual confirmation evidence matrixes of the same evidence source and different evidence sources. The demonstration of evidence integration in evidence-based digital humanities research proposed in this paper is expected to benefit for building an independent knowledge system of evidence-based digital humanities with Chinese characteristics.

Key words: evidence-based digital humanities, multiple mutual proofs, evidence integration, ancient literature works