What really is the Digital Humanities?

As a Digital Public Humanities minor, I get the question, "So what is digital humanities?" and "What can you do with it?" all the time.

Paul Callender and Tristan conducting an oral history interview with Lynda Blackman Lowery and Joanne Bland (not featured)

I love talking about the Digital Humanities because the program is so new, and the endless possibilities of what you can do with it. Over the course of this semester, I am taking a unique course centered on the Digital Public Humanities, in which we discuss the many ideas and theories surrounding the digital humanities. We are referencing "The Digital Humanities - A Primer for Students and Scholars" by Eileen Gardiner to guide us in this process. You can read her book for free through the access of the internet archive here.

The book opened with the same question I was prompted with: what do you define the digital humanities as? My answer is that the digital humanities is using technology to inspect, analyze, and preserve history while making it accessible. However, Gardiner points out that it can be tough to define with the digital humanities being so new and up-and-coming. She argues, "The term digital humanities is widely used in administrative, scholarly, library and information technology" (Gardiner, 1). "The intersection of the humanities and the digital created an environment in which the humanities became subject to new approaches that raised issues about the nature of the humanities while also opening up new research methods" (Gardiner, 3).

Gardiner makes an excellent point that the term can be used for many projects and subjects, making it difficult to define precisely. I understand the digital humanities through sites like Google Scholar, internet archives, digital archives, and collections. Being a student in the digital era, I consider myself very lucky to be able to access so many research materials right from the click of a button.

One of the most significant impacts of this new technology was switching library catalogs from card catalogs to online directories. Before the 1970s, researchers had to know what books and authors they needed, and now researchers can put in their research subject. These online directories can comb through thousands of titles based on keyword-searching technology. This sped up historical research methodologies and impacted both students and scholars.

Michael Ullyot, who wrote a review essay on " Digital Humanities Projects" in 2013, talked a lot about the updates of these research tools, such as databases, while arguing for transparency in the citations and metadata of these more recently produced research projects. He argues that "our trust in digital resources begins with transparency. Their editors must offer an inviting user interface and a description of how they chose and applied their metadata. They must lift the veil, not only to reveal what their data is, (Ullyot, 2)."

Using notes and citations is a critical part of doing historical research, and we are now entering an age where we are creating digital data in our projects, yet we don't know how to cite them. This fits Eileen Gardiner's point: " We understand that our sources cannot even remotely approach the realities we discuss. But in the digital realm, this representation's nature and truth claims are undergoing radical shifts, (Gardiner, 19)."

Introducing Digital Humanities can sometimes challenge the line of historical fact and opinion. As the next generation of Digital historians, we have to consider this and make sure what we are creating has trackable metadata, just as you would have an endnotes page in a history book. So, suppose we don't have a definitive definition, and digital humanities can be so many things. In that case, I ask your reader: What do you think the digital humanities are?

Citations: Gardiner, Eileen, and Ronald G. Musto. The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Ullyot, Michael. “Review Essay: Digital Humanities Projects.” Renaissance Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2013): 937–47. https://doi.org/10.1086/673587.