Caden - What is DH?

Before I read these materials I thought Digital Humanities was mainly about using technology to study classic humanities topics such as literature, history and art. After reading the textbook and the manifesto, I now see that Digital Humanities covers an extremely broad spectrum of topics. Digital Humanities is a combination of everyday questions and digital tools. It also involves using technology to change the ways we study, create, share and understand information. The Manifesto calls Digital Humanities "an array of convergent practices." This idea struck me because it shows that Digital Humanities isn’t  a stationary topic that has all the answers in just one place, it requires a collection of opinions and discussions.

Digital Humanities can cover areas such as digital archives, mapping, data visualization, online exhibits, digital storytelling, text analysis and even interactive websites. What makes a project Digital Humanities is not that it uses a computer or is posted on the internet, instead, there must be a relationship between the technology being utilized and the mode of thinking in Humanities for it to qualify as such. For instance a person who uses a word processor to write an essay is not automatically doing Digital Humanities. In contrast, using software to analyze thousands of novels and search for language patterns is a clearer example of Digital Humanities.

One Digital Humanities example I have seen is Voyant Tools, which can be used to analyze texts in a way. For example a person could take a novel such as Pride and Prejudice. Use digital text‑analysis tools to examine word frequency, patterns and relationships across the novel. This is an example of Digital Humanities because the goal remains to understand literature but digital technology lets the researcher see patterns that would be hard to spot by reading the book alone.

Overall I think Digital Humanities is less about a technology and more about a method of tackling humanities questions. Digital Humanities blends humanistic thinking, with digital techniques and promotes experimentation, collaboration and new methods of sharing knowledge. The main point I took from the readings is that Digital Humanities does not have a fixed definition. Digital Humanities is always changing as technology. The humanities keep influencing one another.


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