Semester 1: Week 2 Reading Blog Post: What is digital humanities? What is data in the humanities??

Reading / September 30, 2021 / 2 Comments

Prior to beginning this course I had no idea that Digital Humanities existed. Now I know that Digital Humanities is an academic field concerned with the application of computational tools and methods to traditional humanities disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy according to Oxford Languages. Digital Humanists use technology to preserve information and resources from previous years. Some of the different fields they work to preserve include history, art, literature and philosophy. Data humanists study how different aspects of human society, culture and technology have advanced, what brought about this change, when it happened and the results from these changes. They do this while organizing, explaining and making this information readily accessible to those who will need the information in the future. This data can come in many forms including but not limited to newspaper articles, videos, essays, books, images and audios.

Data Humanists use several tools to help them shape the raw data that they receive to achieve their goals which include programs like Omeka and Neatline, HTML and CSS to format the data on their web pages. Programs like Zotero act as a place to store and make references to the source information of projects. Places like Zotero act like a warehouse where the data humanist and their team can upload their data to be formatted, sorted and later used in the project. Google Suite can also be used to aid in the sharing and circulation of work in a team.

Data humanities projects are characterized by being unstable. This refers to the everchanging technologies used in projects and the new issues that arise in society and culture. Data humanities projects are also political as this line of work relies on the current laws and policies in the society as of the time of the piece being written. Data humanities projects use several different approaches to obtain, maintain and format information.

The work that data humanists do is quite a lot and can become overwhelming. They work in groups that separate the overall goal of the project into tasks that a single individual can take on and make the information easier for the reader to understand. They do this by categorizing similar data and analyzing said data. They also revise the work to make sure that the project is running as effectively and efficiently as possible.

A digital humanities project can take on several different forms including a knowledge site which is a collection of sources and resources used for research. These are used to make certain works available to the general public through being in a public domain. A project can take on the form of a digital edition of a text. This can be done to make the text more accessible to the public. A project can be a database that categorizes artefacts using an attribute that is not normally included or focused on. There are many other forms of projects which include but are not limited to a digital 3D model, a geographical mapping site, a crowdsourcing project and an online event.

Miriam Posner, “How did they make that?” http://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that/

Paige Morgan, “What do Digital Humanists Do?” https://schuyleresprit.com/his115/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/What-do-digital-humanists-do.pdf