The Digital Humanities

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Digital Humanities, also known as Humanities Computing, is a synthetic field of study concerned with the presentation of Humanities knowledge using new media as well as with the effects this new media has upon the conceptualization, manipulation and preferencing of knowledge. As an academic department, it typically includes individuals from a programming background and traditional humanities scholars who happen to have experience or expertise in digital media; as well as creating methodologies specific to electronic publication and the fundamental changes that new technology brings to modern humanities scholarship.

This can be considered a highly interdisciplinary discipline, which involves experts in both research and teaching; in all of the traditional arts and humanities disciplines (history, linguistics, literature, art, and music of many cultures, for example); specialists in electronic publication and computational analysis, in project design and visualisation, in data archiving and retrieval.

1 Objectives
2 Lens
3 Document
4 Themes
5 Standards
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

[edit] Objectives

The goal of many researchers in the digital humanities is to begin to integrate technology into their scholarly activities, such as the use of GIS; commons-based peer collaboration; interactive games and multimedia in the research and teaching of history, philosophy, literature, religious studies or sociology. It is defined by the belief that means of knowledge dispersal and collection are common among the different disciplines that make up the liberal arts. John Unsworth defines these common activities as: discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating and representing.

In this vein, researchers working and publishing both in traditional disciplines and in the realm of computer science, recognize that computers do more than "speed up" the work of humanities research, but rather provide a new angle of approach and new paradigms.

[edit] Lens

Another way to view the digital humanities is to see it as the study of how new technology affects the concept of knowledge itself. Databases and programming languages privilege certain ways of processing knowledge that can be studied hermeneutically or phenomenologically. Importance is determined by those with access to the new tools and skill sets, and the power to declare what is knowledge is itself an important topic of study. The process of digitising an academic research project itself casts a new light on the subject matter, even making new kinds of data available or radically changing the nature of the research itself.

[edit] Document

A Flash-based dynamic map created at the Archaeological Computing Laboratory, University of Sydney.

One of the goals of the digital humanities is to understand scholarly documents as more than texts and papers. This includes the integration of multimedia, metadata and dynamic environments. A dynamic scholarly document would no longer resemble a linear narrative. An example of this is The Valley of the Shadow project at the University of Virginia or the Vectors Journal at University of Southern California.

In its current incarnation, the modern university does not recognize such documents as on par with written works. If a professor wants to gain tenure, he/she must write papers and books, even if that professor is a visual anthropologist. Multimedia, documentaries, interactive games and other visual mediums are treated as entertainment and not considered research documents.

[edit] Themes

One major theme of the digital humanities, regardless of whether it is approached as lens or tool, is technology's effects upon and uses for the expression of semantic versus syntactic knowledge. This is expressed in the seeming dichotomy between techne and poiesis, and the secondary dichotomy between the allopoietic and autopoietic.

Another theme is the focus of patterns and the interactions of dynamic elements rather than of specific actors and actions.

Both of these can be seen in the works of McLuhan.

[edit] Standards

Because of the interactive and academic nature of digital scholarship, scholars are particularly concerned with open standards and with generic, durable solutions to academic needs of the community. Rather than relying on a proprietary tool, for example, or writing a specialised program for a particular task in a single project, the Digital Humanities draws on the existing body of expertise on the topic, on tools that have been made freely available and customizable, to build solutions that can be repurposed and in turn shared with the open source community.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Susan Schreibman (Editor), Raymond George Siemens (Editor), John Unsworth (Editor) A Companion To Digital Humanities Blackwell Publishers, 2005.
John Unsworth, Scholarly Primitives: What methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this? 2005 http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html
Roberto Busa (1980), 'The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus', Computers and the Humanities 14, 83-90.
Frances Condron, Michael Fraser, and Stuart Sutherland, edd. (2001), Oxford University Computing Services Guide to Digital Resources for the Humanities, West Virginia University Press.
Hancock, B. & Giarlo, M.J. (2001). Moving to XML: Latin texts XML conversion project at the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Library Hi Tech, 19(3), 257-264. [1]
Hockey, Susan. (2001), Electronic Text in the Humanities: Principles and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
James Inman, Cheryl reed, & Peter Sands, edd. (2003), Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities: Issues and Options, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Stephanie Kenna and Seamus Ross, edd. (1995), Networking in the humanities: proceedings of the Second Conference on Scholarship and Technology in the Humanities held at Elvetham Hall, Hampshire, UK 13-16 April 1994. London: Bowker-Saur.
Willard McCarty (2005), Humanities Computing, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Christine Mullings, Stephanie Kenna, Marilyn Deegan, and Seamus Ross, edd. (1996), New Technologies for the Humanities London: Bowker-Saur.
William H. Newell, ed. (1998), Interdisciplinarity: Essays from the Literature. New York: College Entrance Examination Board.
Ruslan Mitkov, ed. (2003). The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Computers and the Humanities (1966-2004)