Practically from its inception as a self-conscious academic discipline in the 1990s, the new-ish field of “Digital Humanities” has struggled to articulate a satisfactory definition of itself.[1] Among the various efforts that have been made, certain elements recur. Thus we find early references to “the application of computing tools to arts and humanities data”[2]; a later emphasis on the discipline’s intrinsically “collaborative” approach to “conceptualizing and solving problems” in ways that “tend to be high-impact, socially-engaged, and of broad scope and duration”[3]; a more abstract acknowledgment of practitioners’ “engage[ment] with the methodological and theoretical aspects of computer use in humanities disciplines”[4]; and a hoped-for recognition of the field’s capacity to “engage much more directly with … the public” than traditional pen-and-paper scholarship, and a desire to “build things for everyone.”[5]
It is easy to get lost in the grand haze of these and other lofty definitions of “DH.” My own preference is to keep things relatively straightforward, defining the digital humanities as no more and no less than an umbrella term for the various ways that scholars and practitioners of arts and letters have integrated their field with emerging technologies of the computer age. Normative aspirations and theoretical hair-splitting are useful for assessing whether a particular digital humanities project is good or interesting, but don’t seem appropriate to include as essential elements of an all-encompassing definition (even bad or mediocre examples of the field, after all, must necessarily fall within its definitional boundaries).
Of course, even my deliberately unexciting definition is still quite vague. We may have a fairly good grasp of what “the humanities” are – history, literary studies, philosophy, etc. – but what does it actually mean to “integrate” these with “emerging technologies of the computer age”? Perhaps instead of grasping for an ideal phrase to sum up the discipline, it might be more helpful to simply provide concrete examples of what digital humanists actually do all day.
As I see it, digital humanities projects lie on a spectrum from the seemingly mundane to the most cutting-edge. At the most basic level (indeed, so basic that some scholars even deny that it falls within the “digital humanities” orbit at all), they involve placing the sources or scholarly output of humanities research online for wider access or collaboration from other scholars or the general public. Examples of this type include The Internet Archive and JSTOR, which house online collections of both primary and secondary source material in the humanities.
Some specialized “digital archives” are curated to spotlight records of particular interest, such as Photogrammar (which houses photographs taken between 1935 and 1944 by the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information) and the Shelley-Godwin Archive (which houses images of original, handwritten manuscripts of various works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft).
One advantage these online archives have is that they allow ready access and inspection without physical travel. They also are searchable in various forms. For example, Photogrammar allows users to discover photos via traditional searchbar, a map, a timeline, or via “treemap” arranged categorically and thematically.
Other digital archives go one step further and include essays, exhibits, and classroom teaching materials to highlight and contextualize featured materials, much in the same way that a physical museum does. For example, the Early Caribbean Digital Archive draws on its archive of writings by enslaved and colonized peoples to produce essays on Early Caribbean slave narratives and Carnival celebrations. Similarly, What America Ate uses its trove of Great Depression-era records to feature exhibits on community cookbooks and food advertising from the era.
Beyond traditional essay and exhibit forms, which have their analogues in the non-digital world, some digital archives present material in ways unique to the online world. Mapping Marronage, for instance, allows users to trace the trans-continental journeys of formerly enslaved people via interactive maps. And Amboyna recreates the 17th-century trial of Japanese mercenaries and English merchants charged with plotting an invasion of a Dutch outpost in Indonesia, inviting users to cast their own verdict. And even beyond websites, digital humanities also involves the creation of educational or narrative tools such as podcasts, documentaries, and even video games that vividly illustrate historical, philosophical, and literary events.
Of course, digital humanities is not limited to the mere dissemination of sources and scholarship. A major branch of the field is also concerned with how digital tools can be integrated into the research process itself. For example, computers can be used to collect and read a vast number of sources for purposes of textual, spatial, and/or time analysis. The results of such work can be seen in America’s Public Bible, an online database of newspapers that have been scanned and made searchable for purposes of locating the use of particular biblical phrases. In this way, shifting patterns of use can be mapped over time.
Computers can also be used for digital recreations of visual and/or audio phenomena. For example, Constructing the Sacred uses a 3D Geographical Information System (GIS) reconstruction model to recreate the ancient Egyptian necropolis of Saqqar at various points in its development. And the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project allows users to view and even hear a carefully-approximated recreation of John Donne’s Gunpowder Day Sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1622.
Other branches of the digital humanities deal with the development of the very tools used to create projects like those described above, such as the popular Omeka software used in the creation of online archives and exhibits. And on the other end of the spectrum, another branch of DH addresses more theoretical questions of how these technologies impact our processes of defining knowledge and education.
In sum, then, the field of digital humanities may or may not be susceptible to a straightforward definition. But the range of practices describe above illustrate the breadth of activities in which its practitioners are engaged, and how they might succeed in integrating humanities research and exhibition with the newly emerging technologies of the computer age.
[1] Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold, “Introduction: Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
[2] Willard McCarty, “What is Humanities Computing?” cited in “Is humanities computing an online discipline?” The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (1999).
[3] Todd Presner, Digital Humanities 2.0: A Report on Knowledge. OpenStax-CNS, 2010.
[4] Nancy Ide and Elli Mylona, “From the Editors,” Computers and the Humanities 38, no. 4 (2004): iii.
[5] Trevor Owens, “Day of DH: Defining the Digital Humanities.” Library of Congress, USA, Day of DH, Taporwiki, 2011.