Getting Started in DH

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Defining DH is a practice as old as the field itself, even to the point of parody.¹ Some of our favorite definitions at the CDH revolve around a chiasmus: the use of computational methods in the humanities, and the humanistic critique of emerging technologies. For Schüller-Zwierlein et al.,

the Humanities are more necessary than ever as our cultural heritage as a species migrates to digital formats. Our relationship to knowledge and information is changing in profound and unpredictable ways. Digital Humanities studies the cultural and social impact of new technologies as well as takes an active role in the design, implementation, interrogation, and subversion of these technologies.²

For Allison Booth and Miriam Posner, DH consists of

advanced humanities research that uses and reflects on computational methods or digital tools is a serviceable definition. But it needs added clauses. Beyond teaching with technology or sharing an essay on a Web site, DH prizes interdisciplinary collaboration and technical experimentation. This mode of scholarship is most worthwhile if it also promotes public engagement and humanistic knowledge and understanding. It can be curatorial, but it must be suspicious of archives taken at face value. It can offer skills that lead to alternative or academic jobs, but it must also recognize the value of beautiful speculation, remembering that all art is quite useless, as Oscar Wilde proposed. Moreover, we reassert a fact that we believe to be self-evident: that DH must concern itself deeply with race, gender, disability, economic and linguistic access, and other intersecting axes of power embedded in our materials and methods, as demanded by this troubled moment in the world.³

Mark Algee-Hewitt gestures toward DH’s constant evolution across the 2010s and where it is going now:

I would define the digital humanities as any scholarly activity that either uses computational or otherwise digital methods to investigate questions of humanities interest, or, conversely, uses humanities methods to investigate questions surrounding digital culture, art, and design. The thing with that, of course, is that the very, very broad definition and encompasses a whole host of things. It was actually Stanford’s own Glen Worthy around the 2011 Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations conference that coined the idea of DH as a “big tent” that included all of these things. But of course, that tent is getting more and more packed as more and more avenues of investigation open, which is why we see various subfields, and now conferences dedicated to those subfields, cropping up. The corner of the digital humanities universe that I inhabit, which is very much the former definition that I gave you that is using computational and quantitative methods to investigate humanities questions, now goes under various labels like, “cultural analytics” or “computational literary studies” (CLS), or “quantitative text analysis.” I think what we’re seeing is an evolution of the field where “digital humanities,” that very, very broad term, is still a useful shorthand for people outside, but it’s being supplanted, at least at a local level, with the various identifiers for subfields that do a better job at representing what’s going on in its various corners.⁴

Finally, according to the National Center for Education Statistics CIP Code 30.5202, DH is:

A program that focuses on the use of new technologies, advanced computing, and public engagement to investigate and analyze questions in the humanities. Includes instruction in anthropology, art, data mining and machine learning, design, digital archives, geospatial technologies, history, human-computer interface design, literature, markup languages, social media technologies, and software development.