Teaching with Digital Humanities: Home

What is digital humanities? In simplest terms, it is the use of digital tools and methods to do work in humanities disciplines--using word frequency analysis to study a text, or a data visualization to study a historical event, for example. This can include digital methods for anything in the lifecycle of the research and creative process, from the use of digital tools to gather and analyze data to publishing and preserving it.

Digital humanities also implies a particularly interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. Matthew Kirschenbaum writes in "What is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?":

“At its core digital humanities is more akin to a common methodological outlook than an investment in any one specific set of texts or even technologies…. Yet digital humanities is also a social undertaking. It harbors networks of people who have been working together, sharing research, arguing, competing, and collaborating for many years.... a culture that values collaboration, openness, nonhierarchical relations, and agility.”

Digital humanities also decenters print text within humanities scholarship. From the Digital Humanities Manifesto:

"Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which: a) print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated; instead, print finds itself absorbed into new, multimedia configurations; and b) digital tools, techniques, and media have altered the production and dissemination of knowledge in the arts, human and social sciences."

So, digital humanists use digital tools and methods to study texts; they collaborate with programmers, archivists, librarians, data scientists, historians, educators, designers, etc.; they do not focus exclusively on studying or producing print material.