Definition of Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities (DH) does not aim to replace any field within the Humanities. Instead, DH acts as the middle man between technology and humanities, which many mistakenly regard as opposite fields. As both fields advanced, it is no surprise that there came a point where they met and exchanged ideas. DH’s innovative nature allows scholars and professionals to use digital mediums such as data sets, data visualization, virtual mapping, virtual reality, informational graphics, videos, podcasts, 3D models, online archives and collections, and more, in order to analyze, display, and share knowledge in new ways. I am reluctant to refer to DH as a field of its own, like History, Anthropology, Art, or other Humanities. Instead, I view DH as a technique and set of tools for better studying those fields.
Collaboration is also a key component of DH. Not only is there collaboration in the past sense that someone wrote the code for the program that the digital humanist utilized, but digital humanists often collaborate with other digital humanists to exchange ideas and knowledge of different technical skills. It does not stop there either, DH is often a much more public field than other academic fields, as DH is often frequented by public humanists and historians. With this public nature, it requires a collaboration between the creator and its audience, the public. For instance, if the public does not like the user-interface of the digital project, the humanist may make revisions to improve the user-interface. This collaboration leads to products better for more than just academia.
As I am a beginner in the field of DH, I am likely to make mistakes, even major ones, in my pursuit of knowledge, but I do not see this as bad or shameful. DH is full of complicated concepts and new softwares that I have not learned yet. Fortunately, its digital nature is beneficial, as I can add changes to this website at any time to make it more accurate to what the discipline is. The digital nature allows for more revisions than print-based academic projects. My own definition has shifted from the naive, “Digital Public Humanities is what museum professionals do when they make virtual programs,” to this more complex definition above. While I have given a definition, it is important to note that there is no formalized definition of what DH is, and the definition will be slightly different depending on which digital humanist you ask.
(This page last updated 09/12/22)
