The World Of Digital Humanities (DH)

Digital humanities (DH) is a domain of intersection of computing or digital technologies and the various disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in perceiving the study of humanities and its associated applications.

DH is often looked at as a  new way of doing scholarly research that involves collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computational efficiency, teaching, and publishing. It amalgamates digital tools and methods with conventional means in an attempt to study humanities. It is a field that is born out of the fact that the printed media is no longer the only and binding source of knowledge production and distribution.

The World Of Digital Humanities

In concrete terms, Digital Humanities(DH) embraces a variety of topics, from curating online collections of primary sources (primarily textual) to the data mining of large cultural data sets to topic modeling. Digital humanities bring together both the digitized and the born-digital materials and incorporate the methodologies belonging to the traditional humanities disciplines and social sciences, with the modern-day and highly efficient computational and analytical tools.

COMMON VALUES REFLECTED

1. Critical & Theoretical
2. Iterative & Experimental
3. Collaborative & Distributed
4. Multimodal & Performative
5. Open & Accessible

 Tools

 Digital humanities scholars use a specialized array of digital tools for their research purposes, which are conducted in a virtual environment, ranging from as small as a mobile device to as large as a virtual reality lab. Environments for creating, publishing, and working with tools designed especially for this dedicated field include everything from personal equipment to institutes and software to cyberspace. A great example of such a tool is the Voyant Toolbox. It is an accessible, free online textual analysis program, which requires the user to copy and paste either a body of text or a URL and then click the ‘reveal’ button to run the program. Many such simple yet highly efficient programs have been ruling the internet from ever since their inception, helping researchers to make significant progress in this field.

DH – Where Computational Intelligence Meets Conventional Methodologies

DIGITAL ARCHIVES

1. Women Writers Project – A long-term research project to make pre-Victorian women writers more accessible through an electronic collection of rare texts
2. 2. Walt Whitman Archive- A hypertext and scholarly edition of Whitman’s works created to help DH researchers, that includes photographs and sounds. It is also the only comprehensive current bibliography of Whitman criticism
3. 3. Emily Dickinson Archive – A collection of high-resolution images of Dickinson’s poetry manuscripts as well as a searchable lexicon of over 9,000 words that appear in the poems

ORGANISATION(S) INVOLVED

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)
It is an umbrella organization that supports digital research and teaching as a consultative and advisory force. It funds several projects such as the Digital Humanities Quarterly journal and the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH) journal, supports the Text Encoding Initiative, and sponsors workshops and conferences, as well as funding small projects, awards, and bursaries.

Digitizing The Field Of Humanities

The current members of ADHO are:

1. Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (AADH)
2. Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)
3. Canadian Society for Digital Humanities / Société Canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN)
4. CenterNet, a massive international network of DH centers
5. The European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH)
6. Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (JADH)
7. Humanistica, L’association francophone es humanités numériques/digitales (Humanistica)

Welcome To The Era Of Digital Platforms!