As regular readers of this blog will know, digital history/digital humanities is one of my interests. I’m most interested in quantitative discourse analysis and crowdsourcing.
I’ve often thought about how we can define “digital humanities”. What is it? When and where did it begin? What direction is it going in? Are there any controversies/debates within the digital humanities field? Is there a good literature survey/guide to this rapidly growing field?
Nathan Johnson, is about to join the Department of English at Purdue University as an assistant professor. He studies and teaches about “information infrastructure, rhetoric, science, and technology”. Johnson has written an interesting bibliography of sources related to such questions. I have pasted it below, but you can see it in its original context here.
- Academic Commons of The City University of New York Digital Humanities Initiative. “The CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide.” CUNY Academic Commons.
- Bobley, Brett. “Why the Digital Humanities?”, July 24, 2008. Written Interview
- Davidson, Cathy. “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions.” PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 707–717.
- Forster, Chris. “I’m Chris. Where am I wrong?” HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, September 8, 2010.
- Hayles, N. Katherine. “How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies.” Lecture presented at the Forum on Academic Publishing in the Humanities, Ithica, NY, March 4, 2009.
- Hockey, Susan. “The History of Humanities Computing.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
- “How Do You Define Humanities Computing / Digital Humanities?” TAPoR — Text Analysis Portal for Research at the University of Alberta.
- Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 1–7.
- Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. “The Question(s) of Digital Humanities.” Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities: An Applied Think Tank for the Digital Humanities.
- Svensson, Patrik. “Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (2009).
- Svensson, Patrik. “The Landscape of the Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 4, no. 1 (2010).
- UCLA Center for Digital Humanities. “The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0.” A Digital Humanities Manifesto.
Because of my disciplinary bias as a historian, I think that the best way to define “digital humanities” is to explore how the field has evolved since it was created. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page for “digital humanities” is rather weak on historical background, although we do learn there that before c. 2011 “digital humanities” was known as “humanities computing”.
I therefore read a recent blog post by Eric Johnson, the webmaster at Monticello historic site (the home of Thomas Jefferson) with interest. Johnson was blegging for advice about how to go about writing such a history. It will be interesting to see what Johnson does with the advice he has been given.
Watch this space!
Leave a Reply