Digital humanities
Digital humanities is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.
By producing and using new applications and techniques, DH makes new kinds of teaching possible, while at the same time studying and critiquing how these impact cultural heritage and digital culture. A distinctive feature of DH is its cultivation of a two-way relationship between the humanities and the digital: the field both employs technology in the pursuit of humanities research and subjects technology to humanistic questioning and interrogation.
Definition
The definition of the digital humanities is being continually reformulated by scholars and practitioners. Since the field is constantly growing and changing, specific definitions can quickly become outdated or unnecessarily limit future potential. The second volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities acknowledges the difficulty in defining the field: "Along with the digital archives, quantitative analyses, and tool-building projects that once characterized the field, DH now encompasses a wide range of methods and practices: visualizations of large image sets, 3D modeling of historical artifacts, 'born digital' dissertations, hashtag activism and the analysis thereof, alternate reality games, mobile makerspaces, and more. In what has been called 'big tent' DH, it can at times be difficult to determine with any specificity what, precisely, digital humanities work entails."Historically, the digital humanities developed out of humanities computing and has become associated with other fields, such as humanistic computing, social computing, and media studies. In concrete terms, the digital humanities embraces a variety of topics, from curating online collections of primary sources to the data mining of large cultural data sets to topic modeling. Digital humanities incorporates both digitized and born-digital materials and combines the methodologies from traditional humanities disciplines and social sciences, with tools provided by computing, and digital publishing. Related subfields of digital humanities have emerged like software studies, platform studies, and critical code studies. Fields that parallel the digital humanities include new media studies and information science as well as media theory of composition, game studies, particularly in areas related to digital humanities project design and production, and cultural analytics. Each disciplinary field and each country has its own unique history of digital humanities.
Berry and Fagerjord have suggested that a way to reconceptualise digital humanities could be through a "digital humanities stack", to map the different "activities, practices, skills, technologies and structures that could be said to make up the digital humanities". This draws upon the way the term stack is used in computer science and in science and technology studies. For Berry and Fagerjord computational thinking and knowledge representation are the foundation of the stack, with other elements building upon these.
In practical terms, a major distinction within digital humanities is the focus on the data being processed. For processing textual data, digital humanities builds on a long and extensive history of digital edition, computational linguistics and natural language processing and developed an independent and highly specialized technology stack. This part of the field is sometimes thus set apart from Digital Humanities in general as 'digital philology' or 'computational philology'. For the creation and analysis of digital editions of objects or artifacts, digital philologists have access to digital practices, methods, and technologies such as optical character recognition that are providing opportunities to adapt the field to the digital age.
History
Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, whose origins reach back to 1940s and 50s, in the pioneering work of Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa, which began in 1946, and of English professor Josephine Miles, beginning in the early 1950s. In collaboration with IBM, Busa and his team created a computer-generated concordance to Thomas Aquinas' writings known as the Index Thomisticus. Busa's works have been collected and translated by Julianne Nyhan and Marco Passarotti. Other scholars began using mainframe computers to automate tasks like word-searching, sorting, and counting, which was much faster than processing information from texts with handwritten or typed index cards. Similar first advances were made by Gerhard Sperl in Austria using computers by Zuse for Digital Assyriology. In the decades which followed archaeologists, classicists, historians, literary scholars, and a broad array of humanities researchers in other disciplines applied emerging computational methods to transform humanities scholarship.As Tara McPherson has pointed out, the digital humanities also inherit practices and perspectives developed through many artistic and theoretical engagements with electronic screen culture beginning the late 1960s and 1970s. These range from research developed by organizations such as SIGGRAPH to creations by artists such as Charles and Ray Eames and the members of E.A.T.. The Eames and E.A.T. explored nascent computer culture and intermediality in creative works that dovetailed technological innovation with art.
The first specialized journal in the digital humanities was Computers and the Humanities, which debuted in 1966. The Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology association was founded in 1973. The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities were then founded in 1977 and 1978, respectively.
Soon, there was a need for a standardized protocol for tagging digital texts, and the Text Encoding Initiative was developed. The TEI project was launched in 1987 and published the first full version of the TEI Guidelines in May 1994. TEI helped shape the field of electronic textual scholarship and led to Extensible Markup Language, which is a tag scheme for digital editing. Researchers also began experimenting with databases and hypertextual editing, which are structured around links and nodes, as opposed to the standard linear convention of print. In the nineties, major digital text and image archives emerged at centers of humanities computing in the U.S., which demonstrated the sophistication and robustness of text-encoding for literature. The advent of personal computing and the World Wide Web meant that Digital Humanities work could become less centered on text and more on design. The multimedia nature of the internet has allowed Digital Humanities work to incorporate audio, video, and other components in addition to text.
The terminological change from "humanities computing" to "digital humanities" has been attributed to John Unsworth, Susan Schreibman, and Ray Siemens who, as editors of the anthology A Companion to Digital Humanities, tried to prevent the field from being viewed as "mere digitization". Consequently, the hybrid term has created an overlap between fields like rhetoric and composition, which use "the methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects", and digital humanities, which uses "digital technology in studying traditional humanities objects". The use of computational systems and the study of computational media within the humanities, arts and social sciences more generally has been termed the 'computational turn'.
In 2006 the National Endowment for the Humanities launched the Digital Humanities Initiative, which made widespread adoption of the term "digital humanities" in the United States.
Digital humanities emerged from its former niche status and became "big news" at the 2009 MLA convention in Philadelphia, where digital humanists made "some of the liveliest and most visible contributions" and had their field hailed as "the first 'next big thing' in a long time."
Values and methods
Although digital humanities projects and initiatives are diverse, they often reflect common values and methods. These can help in understanding this hard-to-define field.Values
- Critical and theoretical
- Iterative and experimental
- Collaborative and distributed
- Multimodal and performative
- Open and accessible
- Enhanced critical curation
- Augmented editions and fluid textuality
- Scale: the law of large numbers
- Distant/close, macro/micro, surface/depth
- Cultural analytics, aggregation, and data-mining
- Visualization and data design
- Locative investigation and thick mapping
- The animated archive
- Distributed knowledge production and performative access
- Humanities gaming
- Code, software, and platform studies
- Database documentaries
- Repurposable content and remix culture
- Pervasive infrastructure
- Ubiquitous scholarship
Digital humanities scholars use computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms, generating new questions and pioneering new approaches. One goal is to systematically integrate computer technology into the activities of humanities scholars, as is done in contemporary empirical social sciences. Yet despite the significant trend in digital humanities towards networked and multimodal forms of knowledge, a substantial amount of digital humanities focuses on documents and text in ways that differentiate the field's work from digital research in media studies, information studies, communication studies, and sociology. Another goal of digital humanities is to create scholarship that transcends textual sources. This includes the integration of multimedia, metadata, and dynamic environments. A growing number of researchers in digital humanities are using computational methods for the analysis of large cultural data sets such as the Google Books corpus. Examples of such projects were highlighted by the Humanities High Performance Computing competition sponsored by the Office of Digital Humanities in 2008, and also by the Digging Into Data challenge organized in 2009 and 2011 by NEH in collaboration with NSF, and in partnership with JISC in the UK, and SSHRC in Canada. In addition to books, historical newspapers can also be analyzed with big data methods. The analysis of vast quantities of historical newspaper content has shown how periodic structures can be automatically discovered, and a similar analysis was performed on social media. As part of the big data revolution, gender bias, readability, content similarity, reader preferences, and even mood have been analyzed based on text mining methods over millions of documents and historical documents written in literary Chinese.
Digital humanities is also involved in the creation of software, providing "environments and tools for producing, curating, and interacting with knowledge that is 'born digital' and lives in various digital contexts." In this context, the field is sometimes known as computational humanities.