The Past Speaks

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!