16 Facts About Digital humanities

Digital humanities is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities.

Definition of the digital humanities is being continually formulated by scholars and practitioners.

Fields that parallel the digital humanities include new media studies and information science as well as media theory of composition, game studies, particularly in areas related to digital humanities project design and production, and cultural analytics.

Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, whose origins reach back to 1940s and 50s, in the pioneering work of Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa, which began in 1946, and of English professor Josephine Miles, beginning in the early 1950s.

Consequently, the hybrid term has created an overlap between fields like rhetoric and composition, which use "the methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects", and digital humanities, which uses "digital technology in studying traditional humanities objects".

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Yet despite the significant trend in digital humanities towards networked and multimodal forms of knowledge, a substantial amount of digital humanities focuses on documents and text in ways that differentiate the field's work from digital research in media studies, information studies, communication studies, and sociology.

Slave Societies Digital humanities Archive, directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University, preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies.

Leroi questions whether or not the digital humanities can provide a truly robust analysis of literature and social phenomena or offer a novel alternative perspective on them.

The literary theorist Stanley Fish claims that the digital humanities pursue a revolutionary agenda and thereby undermine the conventional standards of "pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power".

Burdened with the problems of novelty, the digital humanities is discussed as either a revolutionary alternative to the humanities as it is usually conceived or as simply new wine in old bottles.

Kirsch believes that digital humanities practitioners suffer from problems of being marketers rather than scholars, who attest to the grand capacity of their research more than actually performing new analysis and when they do so, only performing trivial parlor tricks of research.

Later in the same publication, Straumshein alleges that the digital humanities is a 'Corporatist Restructuring' of the Humanities.

Practitioners in digital humanities are failing to meet the needs of users with disabilities.

Digital humanities have been criticized for not only ignoring traditional questions of lineage and history in the humanities, but lacking the fundamental cultural criticism that defines the humanities.

However, it remains to be seen whether or not the Digital humanities have to be tied to cultural criticism, per se, in order to be the Digital humanities.

Part of the reason is that grants in the Digital humanities are geared more toward research with quantifiable results rather than teaching innovations, which are harder to measure.