Digital Humanities is an ambiguous and often deceiving term that aims to explain how the study of humanities has evolved through the 20th and 21st century.

As Professor Hemphill has pointed out, digital humanities is not merely the execution of using digital tools to study humanities. There are various ways of looking at this discipline and it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that digital humanities is a fairly new way of researching and understanding our society and “humanity’s cultural heritage” (Pg. 26 Digital Humanities). I was surprised in reading the first chapter of the Digital Humanities book, that the beginning of the digitization of humanities occurred as early as the 1940s and that slowly the field of humanities has evolved alongside the evolution of our digital culture.

The field of Humanities as it stands now represents various facets depending on what specialization you are looking at and trying to pinpoint a hard definition of this field is almost impossible, as this field is still under “construction”. What we can say is that Digital Humanities is a collaborative process between different disciplines, platforms and topics and we can think of Digital humanities as a link from various disciplines to the general population. I think I now understand what professor Hemphill meant when she said in class that this is a generative practice. The field of Digital humanities has provided individuals within this field the ability to create as they research and study their interests and specializations further. The results have been not only the creation of new understandings or interpretations of our culture but “new ways of accessing and a assessing new cultural production” (pg. 26 Digital Humanities).

Burdick, A., Drucker, J., Lunenfeld, P., Presner, T., & Schnapp, J. (2012). Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.