How do you define Humanities Computing / Digital Humanities?
From Taporwiki
An ongoing, active, open action to take or develop tools and content that give all scholars access to materials that they need and to encourage sharing of materials. These materials fall mostly into the areas traditionally associated with the humanities. The very activity of aggressively growing research in an open environment will doubtless change the definitions and limitations that former labels gave to us and our disciplines. -William Allen, Arkansas Stat University
Digital Humanities is the marriage of two areas of study heretofore considered incompatible - IT and the humanities. DH primarily involves the use of IT to gain new insights into the humanities. The keywords are scale, navigation, and exchange. These tools afford the humanist the ability to analyze large bodies of work on a previously unimagined scale. They also allow for ease of research/data navigation and provide an efficient means of research/data exchange. Secondarily, DH involves an analysis of the humanistic implications of information technology. - Paul Youngman, University of North Carolina-Charlotte
Digital humanities attempts to bring humanistic inquiry and the artifacts of human experience into useful dialogue with digital technology. It is, at once, a practical and a philosophical endeavor: a matter of building and of theorizing the built. Practitioners are as likely to be adept at Java as they are post-structuralism; as drawn to the iPhone as they are to Moby Dick; as committed to a kind of optimistic futurism as they are deeply skeptical of a posthuman condition. Digital humanities is also one of most exciting fields in the humanities today, with a burgeoning community of enthusiasts ranging from undergraduate students to senior scholars. - Stephen Ramsay, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The development, study and application of new technology techniques and methods to traditional modes of scholarship. - Stephen Woodruff, HATII, University of Glasgow
Digital Humanities is any attempt to incorporate digital understandings or culture into scholarship, pedagogy and service. For my particular reasons, I define Digital Humanities as an attempt to use computing methods to understand 19th Century British literature from a book historians point of view. As a teacher, I use Digital Humanities to create a bridge among myself, my students and our contemporary culture. We use all kinds of tools to get into 19th Century print culture, and not just tools to assess the 19th Century moment but to also create content that can serve as a critique of our own use of tools, such as Twitter, Moodle, ClassSpot, tech-enhanced teaching facilities. For instance, we explore gaming as a way to discuss the technological upheaval of the printing press in the early 1900s. That's just a tidbit of my world as a Digital Humanist. - Katherine D. Harris, San Jose State University
I define humanities computing as the field of study that helps to provide insight into the human condition through digital technologies. The methods and techniques used in the digital humanities can be varied: algorithms for emergent art, the application of procedural rhetorics to explore sociocultural issues, or the design and analysis of procedures to make computing technologies more human-friendly. Research methods related to the digital humanities can be hermeneutic (e.g., what are the hidden cultural and social layers within technological practice, and what do they tell us about particular discourse communities?), ontological (e.g., how do I project my own beliefs, desires, and values onto a personal avatar?), or purely practical (e.g., how can I digitize this text to make it available and searchable to those audiences who do not have the means or ability to access a physical copy?) Humanities computing and the digital humanities are of vital importance as they keep technological systems human-centered, leaving room for creativity, exploration, and playfulness. The famous interdisciplinary German thinker G. W. Leibniz pursued the dream of the Universal Computer as a means for freeing up the human mind for more creative and enjoyable pursuits; although information overload and the increased workload of distributed industries have made this goal quite challenging, I feel that the field of digital humanities does more to advance this philosophy of creative playfulness and exploration perhaps more than any other area of scholarly study. - Rudy McDaniel, University of Central Florida
For me, the digital humanities is not a discipline per se, but a set of beliefs, theories, practices, methods, and artifacts associated with the use of digital technologies to support, extend, and transform traditional humanistic fields. It cross-cuts the traditional humanities. I follow Erwin Panofsky's definition of the humanities as those disciplines concerned with interpreting the "records left by man." (Sexism not intended.) Among the specific items in the assemblage of artifacts and ideas that currently characterize the field are (1) the use XML in a variety of forms, including TEI and serial RDF, to encode texts and data, and (2) the use of mathematical graph theory as a unifying language for describing texts, minds, and societies, and other organis(m|ation)s. - Rafael Alvarado, Dickinson College
Humanist Computing is the application of computational methods and associated tools to address specific humanities research problems. Distinct from general computing approaches, Humanities Computing is embedded within the research concerns of the disciplines and sub-fields that make up the humanities. The methods employed in the field may be used to uncover new knowledge about corpora or to visualise research data in such a way as to uncover additional insights and meaning. Succinctly Humanities Computing is about structuring, analysing and communicating humanistic knowledge in a critical and authorial way using computing technology. - Craig Bellamy, King's College London
Digital Humanities, from my perspective as an educator, has to do with helping students use the skills they have (and are learning) as writers and critical thinkers to compose and critique multi-media works in both academia and their daily lives. - Amanda Cash, College of Lake County
Creating, documenting, deploying and supporting software used in Humanities teaching and research; digitization, archiving and publication of Humanities texts through electronic means; using digital tools to generate and answer research questions related to Humanities texts; collaborating on Humanities projects through digital means; etc. etc... - Martin Holmes, University of Victoria
'Digital' Humanities is a misnomer: there nothing to essentially distinguish it from the disciplines of Arts and Letters as practised for centuries. Just as scientists who utilise grid-computing are not 'digital scientists' but still 'scientists', and fiction authors who publish in hypertext are not 'digital novelists', those working in Arts and Letters who use and generate digital materials and digital tools remain 'humanists'. - Matthew Steven Carlos, Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien
Applying spatial information technologies in the field of archaeology is my main subject. But as archaeological data are 'weak', i.e. might have multiple meanings in different contexts, I'm trying to follow up developments in Digital Humanities as a whole. Especially as it is not an established field in German scholarship. - Kai-Christian Bruhn, University of Applied Sciences Mainz, KCB
For those us invested in literary studies and bibliophilism, digital humanities may seem like a contradictory and terrifying set of terms. Yet, the divide between the humanities and digital technologies seems to be increasingly blurred, thus rendering “digital humanities” a complementary set of terms rather than a contradiction. Computing within the humanities is to utilize current computer technologies in the pursuit of literary studies. Digital humanities is the conjoining of different areas of disciplines in order to achieve a richer and more collaborative workspace; digital humanities signals the move towards interdisciplinary approaches within academia and the larger culture around us. E-pedagogy, social media classrooms, digital storytelling, blogs, etc. -- these are merely some examples in the current trend towards more interactive, collaborative, and interdisciplinary ways of learning that allows for a blurring of boundaries. Paving the way for dialogues to occur across different disciplines, digital humanities enables a kind of social utopia in which communication happens beyond the classroom, and even on a global scale. If the humanities concerns itself with the human condition and our place within this world (to put it broadly), it is imperative that humanists address the impact of digital technology on their subjects of inquiries. As English professor Cathy Davidson claimed in a 2009 Modern Language Association panel, this is not the age of digital technology: this is the age of humanists, and it is our tasks to forge and claim our positions as important thinkers and players within today’s “digital age.” - Viola Lasmana, San Francisco State University
Digital Humanities: the creation and preservation of extensible digital archives to document, and tools to interact with, material culture.- Robert Whalen, Northern Michigan University
If you ask to an Italian, a Finnish or an American what HC is, would you get the same kind of answer? So my first answer is to start questioning the nature of your question. I think we need to start to apply the principles of ethnographic research to our field. Considering, for example, the existence of strong cultural differences. The universal language of the digital machine gave us the wrong impression that we all share the same values, methodologies, and approaches to the study of cultural objects. It is not so, and in fact I think there is a huge potential cultural danger in our current obsession with standardization. So my second answer would be that humanities computing is a semiotic oxymoron (pessimistic answer), but also a cultural challenge (optimistic option). Sometimes I ask myself: why HC did not do to humanities what cultural studies did to sociology, anthropology, or philosophy? Think of the profound impact that CS had on their intellectual agendas. My answer is that HC lacked an effective and self-confident cultural vision. This happened, in my opinion, beacause HC until now has been mainly focused on the document culture, and consequently has adopted an approach largely dependent on conservative (or if you prefer 'conservation') practices. The 'paradigm of conservation' is largely dominant in the international scenario, led by historically monolingual and monocultural institutions like TEI, which basically tells the community not just how to encode a text, but what a text is. It has been said by other colleagues that HC is the application of computational methods to humanities research and teaching. This definition is correct, but I think that future of HC would be not just to use and apply formal methods, but to challenge existing discourses, cultures and disciplines. So perhaps the issue would be not how much computing we need for getting the answers, but how much the computer science needs us to ask the right questions.- Domenico Fiormonte, Università Roma Tre
For me, Humanities Computing means the transformation of creative and informative communication (for all individuals, not just academics, students and other experts) via an ever- and expanding array of information and communication technologies, an amplification of the individual's power to research, to write, to communicate, to publish and to participate in, and create new spaces in, the public sphere. Just as I feel that the Humanities enrich everyone's life, humanities transformed by ICTs enrich everyone's life. - Lesley Mary Smith, George Mason University
The best way I've found to describe what Digital Humanities is, in first place to myself, is using a quote from Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49: "You know what a miracle is ... another world's intrusion into this one" - Federico Meschini, De Montfort University
I broadly define Humanities Computing/Digital Humanities as a field in which scholars within the humanities use or study computers or a digital environment (e.g. the WWW, video games, etc.) in their research. I consider myself to be a digital humanities researcher because I am studying digital short fiction and its communities in my thesis, but also because I sometimes use social science methods and computing tools (online questionnaires, quantitative/qualitative analysis, etc.), which reflects the interdisciplinary nature of humanities computing. Although I am currently completing a Ph.D. in English, my M.A. in Humanities Computing and Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta has helped me to approach my research from a more interdisciplinary perspective-- something that I see as being an integral part of humanities computing/digital humanities. - Susan Hesemeier, University of Toronto
Digital humanities studies the intersection and mutual influence of humanities ideas and digital methods, with the goal of understanding how the use of digital technologies and approaches alters the practice and theory of humanities scholarship. In this sense it is concerned with studying the emergence of scholarly disciplines and communicative practices at a time when those are in flux, under the influence of rapid technological, institutional and cultural change. As a way of identifying digital interests and efforts within traditional humanities fields, the term “digital humanities” also identifies, in a general way, any kind of critical engagement with digital tools and methods in a humanities context. This includes the creation of digital editions and digital text or image collections, and the creation and use of digital tools for the investigation and analysis of humanities research materials. - Julia Flanders, Brown University
I often say that humanities computing involves three distinct research areas. First, some researchers apply computing to research questions in the humanities. These might be questions they've always pursued but can now pursue faster or at a larger scale, or they may be questions that could not be addressed satisfactorily at all without computers. Second, some researchers take computing as an object of study using humanities methods. Examples include cyberculture and posthumanism. Third, some researchers take a generative approach, creating new online materials or tools for subsequent study and use. Most of my own work is in this third area. - Stan Ruecker, University of Alberta
