What is digital humanities?

It’s a relatively new field that has many and yet no set definitions. It revolves around humanities but by updating ideas and academic theory to include digital means. Humanities for a long time had a lot of set ideas and methods. It could be thought of as hall way where only the doors on one side had been opened. But as time moved to closer and to the 21st century, the doors on the other side started to open along with ideas/methods behind them.

The way I perceive digital humanities is using new digital methods to question past ideas, but also to observe and create new thoughts and interpretations of past and current media. Kirschenbaum describes digital humanities as “common methodological outlook.” He views it as a way or set of methods of looking at problems and questioning/examining their meaning.

Some of the new methods that have lead to the boom to digital humanities aren’t actually new. Certain monks used to practice analyzing keywords and word frequencies. But the problem was that it was very time consuming, but the digital age has changed that. Texts are now more easy to access and computers have become increasingly faster at processing. New data analysis tools are coming out and past ones are becoming more efficient. Some of the methods digital humanists use are text analysis, organizing ideas and material, and creating models. Not only are words being analyzed but grammar, syntax, and there are even tools to analyze the color of websites. What creates a digital humanist isn’t the use of these to tools but the use of them to create questions and possibly meaning. Sharon Block used topic modeling to analyze the Pennsylvania Gazette from 1728-1800. One of the models showed how the usage of certain words varied over time. It allowed the researchers to visualize and create questions such as was morality increasing as religion and crime were used more often? Though new digital methods still need research, the gazette might have just been showing more crime or possibly rants against region. The methods may not be perfect but they do allow the researcher to find new questions.

Underwood, Ted. 2015. “Seven Ways Humanists Are Using Computers to Understand Text.” The Stone and the Shell. June 4. https://tedunderwood.com/2015/06/04/seven-ways-humanists-are-using-computers-to-understand-text/.

“Text Analysis.” 2016. Tooling Up for Digital Humanities. Accessed August 19. http://toolingup.stanford.edu/?page_id=981.

Sharon Block, “Doing More With Digitization,” Common-Place Blog:http://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-02/tales/

Vidal, Andres. “Colorfy It - Analyze the Colors of Any Website!” Colorfy It. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Sept. 2016.