What is Digital Humanities?

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Defining Digital Humanities is a challenging task. This is because whenever we define things, we limit their scope. The field of Digital Humanities is broad and it encompasses many disciplines across the humanities, social sciences and even the hard sciences. In my view, Digital Humanities is a collaborative attempt by scholars, archivists, librarians, artists to use digital technologies to collect, analyze and interpret data with the goal of producing knowledge. It examines the interaction between human beings and new technologies.

In this definition, a few things need to be kept in mind. Some of the digital humanities projects require some form of collaboration across different spectrums. These collaborations could take different forms. They may be between different scholars, between scholars and librarians, or even librarians with the general public. For example, the New York Public Library has a Digital Humanities Project “What’s on the menu?” in which the general public is invited to use a digital tool to transcribe menus dating back to the 1840s. The collaboration depends on the nature of the project.

Digital Humanities projects are often interdisciplinary. This makes it difficult to limit them to one thing. What glues together the field is the use of digital tools in attempting to solve the problems encountered in the humanities. For example, in dealing with the question of slavery’s impact on American culture and society before the Civil War, an interdisciplinary approach can be utilized to answer this question. That is what two historians, William G. Thomas, III and Edward L. Ayers of the University of Virginia are doing in their Digital Humanities project, “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities.” They use the historiography on slavery, Geographic Information systems (GIS) and Extensible Markup Language (XML). This work spans across the disciplines of history, geography, demography, economics, computer science, etc.

Digital technologies are the primary tools for doing Digital Humanities projects. There are several digital technologies that can be utilized for these projects: cloud computing, scanners, cameras, GIS, computers, Virtual Reality (VR), Social Media, Content Management Systems (CMS i.e. Omeka, Word Press, Drupal, etc.), Extensive Markup Language (XML), etc. These can be used to collect data, analyze and interpret it or present the information either visually or textually. These tools enable us to approach the field of the humanities in a new way, going beyond the textual evidence. Engaging these tools open a new world of possibilities for the humanities as the field of technology continues to grow.

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