Shout out to Digital Humanities

This post is aiming at answering the question below.

What is Digital Humanities?

When searched answer online, the wikipedia shows “Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities.” But when it comes to me, I think DH has two aspects:

  1. Using the Digital technologies studing Humanities;
  2. “Digital Humanity” as a scholarly term.

What are the Digital technologies? Most of times, we think them as “Media”, but it’s almost everything involves with technology can be called “digital techologies”: Engineering, computing, programing/ television, audio, social media, internet … … “Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, of computationally enabled ‘formal representations of the human record.’” And it leads us to think: “How digital devices are changing the way we interact and connect?”

Then back to the main question, what is Digital Humanities? Bethany Nowviskie, Director of the Digital Library Federation (DLF) at CLIR, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and Research Associate Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English at the University of Virginia has answer the question in the ACH ( Assiociation for the Computers and the Humanities) by sharing the answer: “The new CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative has put out a fantastic beginner’s Resource Guide to the Digital Humanities, which includes a set of links on definitions.”

Overall, I think digital humanities is an intersection between human behavior and technology.

Also, a link that might be helpful answer the question: http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities What shows on the website link above did inspire me and made me think a lot more about digital humanities.

Written on September 5, 2016 by Meiqi Zhao