The digital humanities is an area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Sometimes called humanities computing, the field has focused on the digitization and analysis of materials related to the traditional disciplines of the humanities. Digital Humanities currently incorporates both digitized and born-digital materials and combines the methodologies from the traditional humanities disciplines (such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies) with tools provided by computing (such as data visualisation, information retrieval, data mining computational analysis) and digital publishing.
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Digital humanities work has a number of goals. One goal is to systematically integrate computer technology into their scholarly activities, such as the use of text-analytic techniques; GIS; commons-based peer collaboration; interactive games and multimedia in the traditional arts and humanities disciplines like it is done in contemporary empirical social sciences.
Another goal is to create scholarship that is 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 of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular at University of Southern California.
A growing number of researchers in digital humanities are working on using computational tools for the analysis of large cultural data sets. For the examples of these projects, see Humanities High Performance Computing competition sponsored by NEH Office of Digital Humanities in 2008, and also Digging Into Data 2009 Challenge awards.
Digital humanities research can also be categorized in another way. Many humanities scholars want to use computational tools to help them answer already existing research questions. Others are interested in how use of computational analysis can challenge the existing theoretical paradigms, generating new questions and leading to new paradigms.
At present formal academic recognition of digital work in the humanities remains somewhat problematic. Socially this has to do with the slow pace of institutional change. Intellectually it has to do with the curious, poorly understood nature of non-verbal knowledge-bearing objects, or what Davis Baird has called thing knowledge. Curatorially it raises the serious problem of how such knowledge-bearing objects are to be preserved for the long term. Culturally it runs afoul of the low status commonly given to works of popular culture -- multimedia, documentaries, interactive games and other visual media -- which tend to be dismissed as entertainment. The increasing volume of important scholarship in the digital humanities suggests, however, that recognition is unavoidable and that serious attention is urgently needed to the understanding and preserving of these digital objects of knowledge.
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, 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, and 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.
The terminological change from "humanities computing" to "digital humanities" has been attributed to John Unsworth and Ray Siemens who, as editors of the monograph A Companion to Digital Humanities (2001), tried to prevent the field from being viewed as "mere digitization."[1] 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,"[1] and digital humanities, which uses "digital technology in studying traditional humanities objects".[1]
The field of digital humanities is served by several organisations: The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), and the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI), which are joined under the umbrella organisation of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). The alliance funds a number of projects such as the Digital Humanities Quarterly, supports the Text Encoding Initiative, the organisation and sponsoring of workshops and conferences, as well as the funding of small projects, awards and bursaries.[2]
ADHO also oversees a joint annual conference, which began as the ACH/ALLC (or ALLC/ACH) conference, and is now known as the Digital Humanities conference.
The development of digital humanities enforces the building up of digital resources of humanist data, but this also leads to the appearance of legal issues. Due to the (direct or indirect) sensitivity of some of this data more and more restrictions to access of the databases or their parts are going to be introduced.
Another threat faced is the accompanying inevitable underuse of contextual information, which also means the undervaluation of the fundamental semiotic aspects of humanities.