What is Digital Humanities? Post #1

 Alex Forbes

ENGL 510.01

Melinda White

September 1st, 2024


What is Digital Humanities?



Simply put, Digital Humanities is a range of ideologies from resources to the way that we interact online and how our lives have been impacted and altered by the internet, and more specifically, social media. Some examples of Digital Humanities are podcasts, Instagram, websites, blogs, and academic journals, however the possibilities of what digital humanities can be are infinite. To me, digital humanities is a reflection of "real life" or traditional humanities that have evolved into an extension of them as well as a factor that influences them. Currently, both traditional humanities and digital humanities are constantly impacting and affecting one another. Whereas traditional humanities are more easily definable, digital humanities is much harder to define since it is constantly changing.

From what I have interpreted through reading the textbook and the digital manifesto, digital humanities means using technology, especially digital tools to better evaluate and understand the study of humanities. Digital humanities not only allows us to better understand ourselves and how we interact, but it also makes it easier for us to interact and engage with people that we might not normally engage with. For instance, with the aid of social media, anyone could simply log into instagram, or any other platform, and begin conversing with people from all over the world, with various ethnic backgrounds, upbringings, political views, etc. With this new, digital way of communicating and connecting, humanities, more than ever, has become an important part of our reality and our day to day lives. In the US especially, people come from so many backgrounds and speak so many different languages, that it is essential to understand our humanistic culture and the way in which we interact with each other and how that may influence society and beyond.

Digital Humanities is important for our everyday lives and the way in which our society operates because it involves data and digitization, metadata and databases, information visualization and distant reading, data mining and quantifying literature, maps and virtual spaces, and human collaboration such as planning, teamwork, and analysis. 

Digital Humanities is not a replacement for “real-life” or traditional humanities, it is rather it is an extension of them and a way to collaborate with additional perspectives. Furthermore, digital humanities is also not just about digital preservation. This is because digital humanities is about much more than simply preserving and storing digital records, it is about presenting, interpreting, and analyzing data in various ways.

Overall, the readings have broadened my previous ideas of what digital humanities is. This is because previously, I thought digital humanities were simply a digital version of traditional humanities. However, I now know that digital humanities is an extension of traditional humanities, as well as a tool that allows us to further research, analyze, interpret, and understand humanistic studies as a whole.


    One example of a project that I would consider to be digital humanities is The Archives of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America: https://ailla.utexas.org/.



Comments

  1. Dr. MSeptember 2, 2024 at 1:12 PM

    What a cool archive! And you illustrate your understanding with: "digital humanities is an extension of traditional humanities, as well as a tool that allows us to further research, analyze, interpret, and understand humanistic studies as a whole."

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  2. VJ BasraaSeptember 2, 2024 at 7:26 PM

    I appreciate and agree with your interpretation of how digital humanities add to and work with traditional humanities rather than just replacing them. To add to your response, based on my understanding of the reading, digital humanities use computational methods to improve our comprehension of humanistic research rather than just digitizing it. “The Archives of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America” is an excellent example of digital humanities since it not only digitizes resources but also includes datafication and presentation, which fits the book’s description of the core components of digital humanities.

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