What are the digital humanities?

That’s a good question. I have to admit that I was more certain of nature of this field before reading a handful of texts about digital humanites (DH). It seems that the term is used to encompass/refer to the procurement, archival, retrieval, display, and analysis of cultural artifacts (a purposely ambiguous term, here), aided by and/or made possible by computers (see Burdick et al., 2012). In other words, DH apparently comprises most things at the juncture of humanities and computing. DH is highly collaborative. Even the term digital humanities was born of an iterative and collaborative process (Kirschenbaum, 2012).

An iterative and collaborative process.

Perhaps the best way to explain DH is to highlight some of the features of the field that differ from of the social sciences, with which I am more familiar.

In DH, process is as important (if not more important) than results. As written in the Digital Humanities Manifesto, “Process is the new god” (“The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0,” 2009). It’s not about what you know. Rather, it’s about how you came to know it (or not, depending on whether you learned anything). As a student in a field that sticks to established, accepted forms of inquiry (roughly the same methodological approaches that were used half a century ago), this notion is of interest to me. Focusing on process seems like an ideal way to embrace a wide variety of ways of knowing as opposed to just a select few deemed to be of higher esteem than the rest.

I also like that the project is seen as the “basic unit” of DH research (Burdick et al., 2012). This further removes focus from results, shifting it instead to the collaborations, iterations, and conversations necessary to answer the question(s) of interest. This is, evidently, in contrast to the study (experimental, ethnographic, cross-sectional, or what have you), around which research in the social sciences revolves. The project enables multiple sets of results and multiple new insights found along the way toward answering the primary research question(s), whereas studies have clear foci which yield results of an expected type. This project basis (I would assume) puts less pressure on researchers to produce results of a certain type, which likely makes the field less prone to a replication crisis.

Burdick, A. (Ed.). (2012). Digital humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0. (2009, May 29). Retrieved from http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/

Kirschenbaum, M. (2012). Debates in the Digital Humanities. Retrieved September 8, 2016, from http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/38