Digital Humanities (DH) is simultaneously a new field and an old one, its own field and one deeply intertwined with many others. DH is the use of technology to improve and advance Humanities research and pedagogy. This technology not only improves existing approaches to research and pedagogy through automation and tools that tell stories, but also enables new approaches.
One need look no further than Franco Moretti’s idea of “Distant Reading” to find a groundbreaking approach enabled by DH. In short, taking a quantitative approach on a large number of texts can supplement the “Close Reading” typically undertaken by students and scholars of literature. Distant Reading relies upon the increased digitization of texts using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and tools such as Gephi for analyzing networks of people or Voyant for finding trends in phrases used. Nevertheless, Distant Reading is hardly the only type of research being done in DH.
DH as a discipline proper is fairly new. UCLA’s own DH site talks about the change in humanities scholarship occurring in the past decade. It is certainly true that the ubiquity of and improvement in technology has resulted in a recent change. The roots of DH, however, go back nearly 80 years, to the concept of hypertext. In an article published in 1945, Vannevar Bush proposed a device, the “Memex”, that would store materials and allow for quick access to them and coreferencing between them. This concept has served as a model for efforts to publish information in the Humanities. For instance, the Perseus Project, which contains many texts (primarily Latin and Greek), takes as a base layer the text and supports as hypertext much extra information related to the text, such as dictionary entries, commentaries, translations, and pedagogical notes. The recent changes within philology brought about by technology are described by Gregory Crane. UCLA’s Matthew Fisher has created an annotation tool for the classroom that follows some of these principles as well.
DH is not bound by traditional department divisions, fostering collaborative work in groups that benefit from the diverse skillsets of the individuals involved. 3D modeling is one example of a subbranch of DH that relies on teams whose members cross the boundaries of academic departments. Diane Favro discusses the use of 3D modeling for advancing the study of urban history. Projects such as Chris Johanson’s RomeLab, on which I have worked, rely on Archaeology, History, Philology, Architecture, and Computer Science to be successful. At the same time, DH skills are becoming more and more standard within individual disciplines. To say that a project like RomeLab is solely DH and not any of the aforementioned fields would be inaccurate. Still, DH involves more directly the critical analysis of new methods and approaches enabled by technology. Johanna Drucker, for instance, has argued against the trend of treating data as primarily quantitative in humanistic inquiry.
One often overlooked aspect of DH, however, is pedagogy. In Patrik Svensson’s otherwise thorough treatment of the landscape of DH, there is no real discussion of the use of DH outside of research. I strongly believe that DH also encompasses the use of digital tools and technology in the classroom to improve instruction. Whether this involves making better use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) for online instruction, exposing students to the digital tools used in modern research, or having them engage with material electronically, such as writing Wikipedia pages for class projects to share knowledge outside of academia, technology can significantly improve the student and teacher experience. I hope that, moving forward, this becomes a more explicit priority within DH.