What is Digital Humanities?

 I consider digital humanities to be a very broad term that encompasses various components. When I first thought about the definition of digital humanities, I believed it was the analyzation of humans through a digital perspective. After reading the Digital Humanities Coursebook I learned that the term is even broader than I had interpreted and covers more ground than I had realized. Digital Humanities takes the art, music and literature form of humanities and turns it into a digital component (Drucker, pg.1). While the definition is broad, I did learn from the Digital Manifesto that digital humanities is not just one field that happens to combine components from different fields (Digital Manifesto, pg.2). The reason it is not just one field is due to the unique ways you can use digital humanities to create something new in more than one specific field. In the Digital Manifesto they refer to digital humanities as "an array of convergent practices" which I believe is one of the best ways to define it (Digital Manifesto, pg.2).

While interpreting my own definition and learning more about the actual definition, I started to recall projects that I had seen that could fall under digital humanities. One project that came to my mind first was the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit I went to last winter. This exhibit took famous Van Gogh painting's and brought them alive through digital processing for a whole new experience.  

Comments

  1. KaitSeptember 4, 2022 at 2:58 PM

    Hi Natalia! I agree with your perspective with how to best define digital humanities as "an array of convergent practices" because it's such a wide topic that is made up of many methods and perspectives. I too didn't realize at first how broad the subject was until reading the course book. I liked that the manifesto helped break it down for us. I loved the Van Gogh exhibit they had in Boston last year! It was a very creative way to expose people to his artwork immersively and I think it's a great example of a digital humanity.

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  2. Dr. MSeptember 5, 2022 at 10:22 AM

    I saw the VanGogh exhibit too, what a cool example! It not only captures a historic body of work digitally, it disseminates it to a broader audience, also in keeping with the ideals of less gate-keeping and broader accessibility in DH.

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