DIGITAL HUMANITIES!

I love quotes. I feel like for me to fully understand something; I need to hear it in the perspective of a bunch of different people. Trying to find a quote about what digital humanities, however, was a lot harder than finding quotes about the meaning of life (crazy, right?!). That, however lead me to question what the root of that phrase is, humanities. As said in The Heart of the Matter:

“the humanities—including the study of languages, literature, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, comparative religion, ethics, and the arts—are disciplines of memory and imagination, telling us where we have been and helping us envision where we are going.”

Humanities, while such a broad topic, has a focus on something that is most central to us all, which is us. Our langauges, our writings, our history, our thoughts and our beliefs have so much more to tell us than what they describe. Whether we are trying to understand our past or trying to predict our futures, we want to have a deep understand of it all so we can try to better piece together the world we have created.

With the introduction of digital technology, there was a huge shift in the paradigms of human interaction. Developments in technology allowed for calls to be made across continents, emoji’s to be seen by all the people of Twitter, and for the lights in our houses to be controlled by a clever cylinder named Alexa. In the world we live in today, technology and our digital lives seem to be way more than just little gadgets in our pockets and a sub-140 character blurb. They exist as an extension of who we are, and it is in that space where our two lives meet that we see the role of technology. By defining the discipline of digital humanities, we can focus solely on how technology has altered our ever changing lives, and try to better understand the future relationship between us and technology.

Digital humanities seem to be an area of study that has a lot of potential development. The fact that our digital lives are doing nothing but merging more and more with our real lives leaves so much to be understood, not only about technology but about people as well. An even bigger factor in the growth of digital humanities is that the rate at which the digital world is growing far outdoes our understanding of it, and it seems like we’ll be playing catch-up with it for a really, really long time.