Intro to DH
a minimal computing project for teaching digital humanities in prison

What are the Digital Humanities?

Digital Humanities uses digital technologies to do humanities work and humanistic modes of inquiry to analyze digital technologies. A relatively new field, digital humanities is constantly growing and changing. Therefore, a good first place to look to for a definition of the field is Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, where the entry is regularly updated and revised. For readers without internet access, the first two sections of the Wikipedia entry (as of November 26, 2020) are published below.

Digital Humanities

Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. 1 2 DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. 3 It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution. 3

By producing and using new applications and techniques, DH makes new kinds of teaching and research possible, while at the same time studying and critiquing how these impact cultural heritage and digital culture. 2 Thus, a distinctive feature of DH is its cultivation of a two-way relationship between the humanities and the digital: the field both employs technology in the pursuit of humanities research and subjects technology to humanistic questioning and interrogation, often simultaneously.

The definition of the digital humanities is being continually formulated by scholars and practitioners. Since the field is constantly growing and changing, specific definitions can quickly become outdated or unnecessarily limit future potential. 4 The second volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016) acknowledges the difficulty in defining the field: “Along with the digital archives, quantitative analyses, and tool-building projects that once characterized the field, DH now encompasses a wide range of methods and practices: visualizations of large image sets, 3D modeling of historical artifacts, ‘born digital’ dissertations, hashtag activism and the analysis thereof, alternate reality games, mobile makerspaces, and more. (…) 5

Historically, the digital humanities developed out of humanities computing and has become associated with other fields, such as humanistic computing, social computing, and media studies. In concrete terms, the digital humanities embraces a variety of topics, from curating online collections of primary sources (primarily textual) to the data mining of large cultural data sets to topic modeling. Digital humanities incorporates both digitized (remediated) and born-digital materials and combines the methodologies from traditional humanities disciplines (such as rhetoric, history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies) and social sciences, 6 with tools provided by computing (such as hypertext, hypermedia, data visualisation, information retrieval, data mining, statistics, text mining, digital mapping), and digital publishing. Related subfields of digital humanities have emerged like software studies, platform studies, and critical code studies. Fields that parallel the digital humanities include new media studies and information science as well as media theory of composition, game studies, particularly in areas related to digital humanities project design and production, and cultural analytics.

Berry and Fagerjord have suggested that a way to reconceptualise digital humanities could be through a “digital humanities stack”. They argue that “this type of diagram is common in computation and computer science to show how technologies are ‘stacked’ on top of each other in increasing levels of abstraction. Here, [they] use the method in a more illustrative and creative sense of showing the range of activities, practices, skills, technologies and structures that could be said to make up the digital humanities, with the aim of providing a high-level map.” 7 Indeed, the “diagram can be read as the bottom levels indicating some of the fundamental elements of the digital humanities stack, such as computational thinking and knowledge representation, and then other elements that later build on these. “ 8

In practical terms, a major distinction within digital humanities is the focus on the data being processed. For processing textual data, digital humanities builds on a long and extensive history of digital edition, computational linguistics and natural language processing and developed an independent and highly specialized technology stack (largely cumulating in the specifications of the Text Encoding Initiative). This part of the field is sometimes thus set apart from Digital Humanities in general as “digital philology” or “computational philology”. For the analysis and digital edition of objects or artifacts, different technologies are required.

History

Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, whose origins reach back to 1940s and 50s, in the pioneering work of Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa, which began in 1946, 9 and of English professor Josephine Miles, beginning in the early 1950s. 10 11 12 13 In collaboration with IBM, Busa and his team created a computer-generated concordance to Thomas Aquinas’ writings known as the Index Thomisticus. 3 Other scholars began using mainframe computers to automate tasks like word-searching, sorting, and counting, which was much faster than processing information from texts with handwritten or typed index cards. 3 In the decades which followed archaeologists, classicists, historians, literary scholars, and a broad array of humanities researchers in other disciplines applied emerging computational methods to transform humanities scholarship. 14 15

As Tara McPherson has pointed out, the digital humanities also inherit practices and perspectives developed through many artistic and theoretical engagements with electronic screen culture beginning the late 1960s and 1970s. These range from research developed by organizations such as SIGGRAPH to creations by artists such as Charles and Ray Eames and the members of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology). The Eames and E.A.T. explored nascent computer culture and intermediality in creative works that dovetailed technological innovation with art. 16

The first specialized journal in the digital humanities was Computers and the Humanities, which debuted in 1966. The Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) association was founded in 1973. The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) were then founded in 1977 and 1978, respectively. 3

Soon, there was a need for a standardized protocol for tagging digital texts, and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was developed. 3 The TEI project was launched in 1987 and published the first full version of the TEI Guidelines in May 1994. 12 TEI helped shape the field of electronic textual scholarship and led to Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is a tag scheme for digital editing. Researchers also began experimenting with databases and hypertextual editing, which are structured around links and nodes, as opposed to the standard linear convention of print. 3 In the nineties, major digital text and image archives emerged at centers of humanities computing in the U.S. (e.g. the Women Writers Project, the Rossetti Archive, 17 and The William Blake Archive 18 ), which demonstrated the sophistication and robustness of text-encoding for literature. 19 The advent of personal computing and the World Wide Web meant that Digital Humanities work could become less centered on text and more on design. The multimedia nature of the internet has allowed Digital Humanities work to incorporate audio, video, and other components in addition to text. 3

The terminological change from “humanities computing” to “digital humanities” has been attributed to John Unsworth, Susan Schreibman, and Ray Siemens who, as editors of the anthology A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004), tried to prevent the field from being viewed as “mere digitization.” 20 Consequently, the hybrid term has created an overlap between fields like rhetoric and composition, which use “the methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects,” 20 and digital humanities, which uses “digital technology in studying traditional humanities objects”.[20] The use of computational systems and the study of computational media within the humanities, arts and social sciences more generally has been termed the ‘computational turn’. 21

In 2006 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (renamed Office of Digital Humanities in 2008), which made widespread adoption of the term “digital humanities” all but irreversible in the United States. 22

Digital humanities emerged from its former niche status and became “big news” 22 at the 2009 MLA convention in Philadelphia, where digital humanists made “some of the liveliest and most visible contributions” 23 and had their field hailed as “the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” 24

Wikipedia contributors. “Digital humanities.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 26 Nov. 2020. Web. 26 Dec. 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_humanities&oldid=990774761

Next: A DH That Matters

  1. Drucker, Johanna (September 2013). “Intro to Digital Humanities: Introduction”. UCLA Center for Digital Humanities. Retrieved December 26, 2016. ↩︎

  2. Terras, Melissa (December 2011). “Quantifying Digital Humanities” (PDF). UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Retrieved December 26, 2016. ↩︎ ↩︎2

  3. Burdick, Anne; Drucker, Johanna; Lunenfeld, Peter; Presner, Todd; Schnapp, Jeffrey (November 2012). Digital_Humanities (PDF). Open Access eBook: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262312097. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-10-26. Retrieved 2016-12-26. ↩︎ ↩︎2 ↩︎3 ↩︎4 ↩︎5 ↩︎6 ↩︎7 ↩︎8

  4. Warwick, Claire; Terras, Melissa; Nyhan, Julianne (2012-10-09). Digital Humanities in Practice. Facet Publishing. ISBN 9781856047661. ↩︎

  5. “Debates in the Digital Humanities”. dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu. Archived from the original on 2019-05-12. Retrieved 2016-12-29. ↩︎

  6. “Digital Humanities Network”. University of Cambridge. Retrieved 27 December 2012. ↩︎

  7. Berry, David M.; Fagerjord (2017). Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. UK: Polity. p. 18. ISBN 9780745697666. ↩︎

  8. Berry, David M.; Fagerjord (2017). Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. UK: Polity. p. 19. ISBN 9780745697666. ↩︎

  9. Stagnaro, Angelo. “The Italian Jesuit Who Taught Computers to Talk to Us”. ncregister.com. National Catholic Register. Retrieved 4 April 2020. ↩︎

  10. Heffernan, Laura; Sagner Buurma, Rachel (2018-04-11). “Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading”. Modernism / Modernity Print+. 3 (1). Retrieved 2018-08-17. ↩︎

  11. Svensson, Patrik (2009). “Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities”. Digital Humanities Quarterly. 3 (3). ISSN 1938-4122. Retrieved 2012-05-30. ↩︎

  12. Hockney, Susan (2004). “The History of Humanities Computing”. In Susan Schreibman; Ray Siemens; John Unsworth (eds.). Companion to Digital Humanities. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1405103213. ↩︎ ↩︎2

  13. Wimmer, Mario (Fall 2019). “Josephine Miles (1911–1985): Doing Digital Humanism with and without Machines”. History of Humanities. 4 (2): 329–334. doi:10.1086/704850. S2CID 214042140. ↩︎

  14. Feeney, Mary & Ross, Seamus (1994). “Information Technology in Humanities Scholarship, British Achievements, Prospects, and Barriers”. Historical Social Research. 19 (1 (69)): 3–59. JSTOR 20755828. ↩︎

  15. Berry, David M.; Fagerjord, Anders (2017). Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-9765-9. ↩︎

  16. McPherson, Tara. “DH by Design: Feminism, aesthetics + the digital.” Congress of the Social Science and Humanities. University of Calgary, 2016-05-31. Keynote. ↩︎

  17. Jerome J. McGann (ed.), Rossetti Archive, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, retrieved 2012-06-16 ↩︎

  18. Morris Eaves; Robert Essick; Joseph Viscomi (eds.), The William Blake Archive, retrieved 2012-06-16 ↩︎

  19. Liu, Alan (2004). “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse”. Critical Inquiry. 31 (1): 49–84. doi:10.1086/427302. ISSN 0093-1896. JSTOR 10.1086/427302. S2CID 144101461. ↩︎

  20. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (2011-05-08). “The humanities, done digitally”. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2011-07-10. ↩︎ ↩︎2

  21. Berry, David (2011-06-01). “The Computational Turn: Thinking About the Digital Humanities”. Culture Machine. Archived from the original on 2012-01-01. Retrieved 2012-01-31. ↩︎

  22. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2010). “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” (PDF). ADE Bulletin (150). ↩︎ ↩︎2

  23. Howard, Jennifer (2009-12-31). “The MLA Convention in Translation”. The Chronicle of Higher Education. ISSN 0009-5982. Retrieved 2012-05-31. ↩︎

  24. Pannapacker, William (2009-12-28). “The MLA and the Digital Humanities” (The Chronicle of Higher Education). Brainstorm. Retrieved 2012-05-30. ↩︎