Digital humanities (DH)

Digital humanities (DH) refers to both an academic field and a social movement in which research work and teaching in the humanities make use of digital technology. Generally, this term refers to the application of computer technology to academic fields that have traditionally been strictly text-based. Uses of such technology in DH include computation; database indexing; digital preservation; presentation and distribution of research findings; use of multimedia such as graphics, video, and audio; and modeling and mapping applications.

Brief History

In the arena of computing and humanities, the pioneer is considered to be a Jesuit priest named Father Roberto Busa. In 1949, he began an index of every written work of St. Thomas Aquinas, which was made up of roughly 11 million words. To accomplish the task, Father Busa enlisted the help of Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM. Over a period of three decades, they created the Index Thomisticus, in fifty-six volumes. Initially, the project was stored using punch cards. Then, the information was moved to magnetic tapes and finally to compact discs in 1989.

In 1966, the first digital humanities journal—first called Computers and the Humanities and then renamed Language Resources and Evaluation—was published. Computing became important within the field of lexicography, the practice of compiling dictionaries, in the early 1980s. For example, linguists at the University of Birmingham used computers for statistical analysis of contemporary word usage. That data was used in various English language teaching materials and dictionaries published by Collins. Oxford University Press combined traditional historical scholarship with computer technology to store, edit, and typeset the twenty-volume second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

As computers and technical infrastructure became more commonly used in university humanities departments, many institutions provided generalized “Humanities Computing” services on an ad-hoc basis. These departments were run by staff from the library or technical departments, and the service they provided was often no more than basic information technology assistance, such as helping professors learn to use their computers.

In 1986, the University of Virginia hired scholar Jerome McGann, who is now credited with defining the emerging field of DH. McGann’s textual editing scholarship reached the limits of paper, and he sought the assistance of computer technology to extend his work. McGann and Johanna Drucker later created and directed the University of Virginia’s SpecLab, a DH laboratory. Scholars in this laboratory designed the prototypes for projects such as the Rossetti Archive, a digital archive of all of the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and “The Ivanhoe Game,” a textual analysis role-playing game. These developments were responsible for the rebranding of Humanities Computing as DH, and the establishment of its core concern as textual scholarship.

In 2006, the Modern Language Association (MLA) published Electronic Textual Editing, a volume of essays concerned with both practical technical advice and theoretical questions about the significance of the shift from print to electronic media. In 2008, having funded DH for more than a decade, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) founded the Office of DH, a distinct and permanent funding stream for DH. In 2010, Google launched a DH Research Program with the purpose of producing tools that would integrate with Google Books and its other related commercial services.

Overview

DH is based around projects. DH projects are mostly initiated by the faculty or students of a university and built around either a research question or a particular university collection or archive. A defining feature of DH projects is their hands-on nature that emphasizes learning through both collaboration and constructive activities. These projects can range from small, one-off projects to large-scale, long-term projects involving multiple institutions and hundreds of collaborators.

Generally, a project will have a principal organizer responsible for organizing the team, establishing timelines for deliverables, and assessing the project at each stage of development. The projects are carried out by teams with complementary skillsets and interests. DH project teams can consist of multiple circles of researchers, faculty, staff, and students as well as community partners. University humanities departments might work with partner institutions such as museums, libraries, and archives, as well as community members, university alums, amateur historians, and collectors. They may also have partnerships with corporations, especially media and technology companies. While these projects generally occur outside the classroom setting, they are often anchored to a repeating course.

A major function of DH is to connect classrooms with libraries, museums, and archives. Another function is to make those places central training grounds for hands-on projects that students conduct with peer teams. By putting students in working research communities from the start, DH departs from the traditional educational model in which the student prepares through classroom work before beginning research production.

DH projects cross boundaries between disciplines such as humanities, library science, information technology, and design. As a result, they often do not adhere to the usual departmental design of universities. Furthermore, these projects often involve collaborations between universities. These collaborations offer potential benefits. For example, partner institutions can distribute responsibilities and workload according to member strengths while each benefitting equally from the output. Another advantage is the potential for cost-sharing. For students, intra-university projects offer a sense of shared identity in a larger research community beyond their campus.

Because DH projects can involve experts outside of the university and often draw on crowd-sourcing for tasks such as annotation of documents and transcriptions, they create a new class of citizen scholars who participate in the research and production process rather than only being consumers of research outputs.

Because of the cross-disciplinary nature of DH projects, they typically require support structures that cut across traditional divisions between university departments. Funding often comes from private foundations, public granting agencies such as NEH, and private industry partners. The NEH’s Office of DH (ODH) offers specific grant programs to fund projects that develop new tools for humanities research, learning, teaching, public engagement, and open-access publishing, as well as for the study of digital culture from a humanistic perspective. ODH’s goal is to increase the capacity for humanities fields to apply digital methods. Along with ODH, the charitable Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a major funder of DH projects.

Many organizations and conferences are dedicated to DH. The largest is the Alliance of DH Organizations (ADHO), which encompasses the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the Canadian Society for DH, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, the European Association for Digital Humanities, the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computers (ALLC). The ADHO gives the Roberto Busa Award once every three years in recognition of outstanding lifetime achievements in the application of computer and information technologies to humanities research. ADHO holds an annual international conference.

One example of a large-scale project is DARIAH-EU (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities), a collaboration among ten European nations to digitize arts and humanities data. Martin K. Foys, a medievalist at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, created a digital map of the Bayeux Tapestry, an enormous and richly detailed eleventh-century embroidered tapestry that portrays the Battle of Hastings. The tapestry is a work of art as well as a historical document that mingles text and images; its digital rendering allows scholars to efficiently scroll through to analyze the images and text. In 2006, a web-based version of the Index Thomisticus Treebank debuted, allowing collaborators to start syntactic annotation of the entire body of work. In 2014, the European Union gave the program European Research Infrastructure (ERIC) status; in 2016, DARIAH was awarded Landmark Status for its excellence in scientific research. In 2023, Spain and Switzerland joined DARIAH-EU, and the organization secured more funding than ever to support their projects, preserving and increasing access to Europe's arts and humanities.

The University of New Orleans’s (UNO’s) Ethel and Herman L. Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies has engaged in multiple DH projects. “Freedom on the Move” is a collaboration among the UNO, Cornell University, and the University of Alabama to collect advertisements for fugitives from North American slavery into one database. The project collected over 33,700 advertisements. New Orleans Historical, a collaboration with Tulane University, is a digital platform to which graduate students contribute content. The Midlo Center partnered with UNO’s Louisiana Special Collections Department on the Orleans Parish School Board Project. The project seeks to create a digital index of documents spanning 1,600 linear feet from 170 years of public education in New Orleans—a collection unmatched in the nation for its size and breadth.

The DH movement has come under some criticism. For example, some observers decry the emphasis of DH on proving that humanities education is beneficial for job-seeking, thereby turning academic university departments into job-training courses. Additionally, critics express concerns that the pressure to secure grant funding is forcing university humanities departments away from serious scholarly study and toward fundraising for technology and staff trained in its application.

Bibliography

Allington, Daniel, et al. “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of DH.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 May 2016, lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Cohen, Patricia. “Humanities Scholars Embrace Digital Technology.” New York Times, 16 Nov. 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

“Electronic Textual Editing.” Modern Language Association, www.mla.org/Publications/Bookstore/Nonseries/Electronic-Textual-Editing. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

“Father Busa, Pioneer of Computing in Humanities with Index Thomisticus, Dies at 98.” Forbes, www.forbes.com/sites/robertobonzio/2011/08/11/father-busa-pioneer-of-computing-in-humanities-dies-at-98. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

“Home: Ivanhoe.” Ivanhoe, ivanhoe.scholarslab.org. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Kirsch, Adam. “Technology Is Taking over English Departments.” The New Republic, May 2014, newrepublic.com/article/117428/limits-digital-humanities-adam-kirsch. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

“Rossetti Archive.” www.rossettiarchive.org. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

“A Short Guide to the Digital‗Humanities.” JeffreySchnapp.com, jeffreyschnapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/D‗H‗ShortGuide.pdf. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.