What is Digital Humanities?



The phrase ‘digital humanities’ may be one of the broadest blackholes I have ever found myself trying to refine. While reading the select introductory excerpts, along with additional research, I have noticed a pattern in which most definitions are either extremely simple, or longwinded. One of the simplest, yet potentially most effective, definitions of digital humanities is that “Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices” (The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.) The digital humanities encompass a large plate of end-results, that it feels exclusive to narrow down a definition to one sentence. Digital humanities, to me, is “the process in which physical media is presented in a digital format.” While the digital humanities can include numerous methods and results, I have found that most definitions of digital humanities tackle these aspects.
 
One of the aspects of digital humanities that tends to get lost in the collective of numerous definitions is the way in which the final presentation of a project is displayed. While a common misconception is that the presentation much be online, either in the form of a website, portfolio or digital collection, it does not necessarily have to be a website that has been published. In the overview portion of The Digital Humanities Coursebook, author Johanna Drucker describes that the presentation portion of a collected project, “may be web-based or offline, depending on the needs and goals of the project. A project can be digital without being online, but all online projects are based on digital files and computational processes” (Drucker 1.) Though the conclusion of a project does require a digital visual of some kind, it does not need to be online. 
 
I feel there are examples of digital humanities embedded so deeply in our everyday lives that we wouldn’t ordinarily attribute them to anything formulaic. One example that came to my mind was taking original film negatives from the pre-digital era of Hollywood (such as my favorite film The Wizard of Oz (1939)) and converting them into the digital versions we have at our disposal any moment we desire. The material aspects of this conversion are the film negatives and the soundtrack, and the processing would refer to the equipment and digital capturing devices that are used to create the digital presentation of the film.

Comments

  1. Dr. MSeptember 5, 2022 at 10:18 AM

    Wow, I hadn't thought of the conversion of film to digital, but this is definitely re-mediating and preserving of "old media" forms!

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  2. Dr. MSeptember 5, 2022 at 10:31 AM

    I also think you should add, "The phrase ‘digital humanities’ may be one of the broadest blackholes I have ever found myself trying to refine." to the class manifesto! haha

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  3. AnnaSeptember 6, 2022 at 12:53 PM

    Trying to define digital humanities is definitely a rabbit trail. I liked your idea with the Wizard of Oz. It makes me wonder how many other historic things we could take and use in a new digital format.

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  4. Jordan RobichaudSeptember 6, 2022 at 1:54 PM

    I agree with what you say in referring to defining digital humanities as broad and a blackhole, I too struggled with the prompt and novel at how subjective a field of study like this can be. I really like what you've done here in bringing a well-known classic film such as The Wizard of Oz into the picture in describing what digital humanities is. It really drives home the idea that though digital humanities is a relatively new field of study, it does not necessarily bring new things to the table... Rather it assesses well-known things in a new way.

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