What is DH?

Now, Digital Humanities deconstructs the very materiality, methods, and media of humanistic inquiry and practices. But we must persist in asking: Where did humanities disciplines come from, in response to what kind of needs, with what sort of explanatory power?…Digital Humanities is about convergence: Not only between humanities disciplines and media forms, but also between the arts, sciences, and technologies.”

from The Digital Humanities Manifesto, Version 2.0 

In its broadest sense, DH considers the impact of computer technologies and digital technologies on society and cultures. The mashup of technology and the humanities works both ways. On the one hand, digital humanities utilizes humanistic inquiry to analyze digital tools and technologies. Conversely, digital humanities also allows humanities-based scholarship the opportunity to develop its modes of inquiry with digital technologies. In either case, multiple fields of thought, epistemologies, and methodologies collide. These frictions are fruitful and productive. Failure, iteration, and the process of construction > re-construction > de-construction are invaluable, generative, and informative. These conversations are always shifting and based on a dense web of contingency between subjects, creators, designers, and scholars.

Digital Humanities owes as much to media studies, visual studies, and cultural studies as it does to computational studies and the advent of computational technologies. As a result, DH covers a vast array of interests, from scholars like Lisa Nakamura who studies racialization practices which occur online to Lisa Parks, who critically examines the material infrastructures on which our digital lives depend. DH moves backwards and forwards through time and space, utilizing this disorientation to destabilize naturalized regimes of knowledge and knowledge production. Consider the work of Angela Haas who argues that wampum was the earliest form of hypertext.

As the quote above explicitly states, DH is about convergence/clashing/mashup/remix. It is not simply the creation of an online project nor is it simply the rote “mastery” of digital tools. DH must ask questions, even if it offers no easy solutions or answers. In “To Queer Code,” Ann Daramola asks, “One of my favorite questions to ask myself is, what would a computer look like if it was coded by Haitian women?…All of the computer languages we have now were written by a majority of white men. So their way of thinking can be considered very binary…But take for instance Yoruba cosmology, ideas and concepts are much more fluid–it can be zero and one at the same time!” DH understands that who we are matters as much as what we make — for all our makings are direct reflections of ourselves. DH is self-conscious, reflective, and reflexive. DH projects are highly collaborative efforts, marrying the skill sets and scholarly approaches of those involved into a robust team. Ideally, DH projects themselves are as much about learning as they are about teaching. Those involved with projects have much to learn from one another, even as they utilize digital tools to “tell” their particular stories.

As a burgeoning field, DH has room to grow. DH should not be an unquestioning celebration of computational technology, particularly when the advent of such technologies owes much to military-industrial complex. While much of the literature relishes Utopian ideals and espouses some level of anti-capitalism, it rarely (if ever) directly confronts the legacy of colonialism. DH should not and cannot lose sight of materiality and the intersections of systemic forms of oppression. Increasingly, scholars are asking for more rigorous accounts of what constitutes DH and delineating what is resoundingly not DH. See the bibliography below for places to begin your own inquiry into DH.

What is DH?

Online Sources

Books

  • Cohen, Daniel J., and Tom Scheinfeldt. Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
  • Deegan, Marilyn, and Willard McCarty. Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012.
  • Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader. Eds. Melissa Terras, et al. Farnham: Taylor and Francis, 2013.
  • Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics. Ed. Brett D. Hirsch. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2014.
  • Klein, Julie T. Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.
  • Svensson, Patrik. Big Digital Humanities: Imagining a Meeting Place for the Humanities and the Digital. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016.
  • Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities. Eds. Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Articles

  • DeSpain, Jessica. “A Feminist Digital Humanities Pedagogy Beyond the Classroom.” Transformations 26.1 (2016): 65-73.
  • Liu, Alan. “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 128.2 (2013). 
  • Martin, III, John, and Carolyn Runyon. “Digital Humanities, Digital Hegemony: Exploring Funding Practices and Unequal Access in the Digital Humanities.” ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society 46.1 (2016): 20-6.

Journals

Digital Projects

Professional Organizations

Funding and Opportunities

Build it and Break it