What are “Digital Humanities?”
“Contemporary research in the humanities has expanded beyond anything that could be considered traditional. Historians are building interactive digital maps, literary scholars are using computers to look for patterns across millions of books, and scholars in all disciplines are taking advantage of the internet to make their work more dynamic and visually engaging. Digital humanities (DH) is the umbrella term that describes much of this work. It is neither a field, a discipline, nor a methodology. It is not simply the humanities done with computers, nor is it computer science performed on topics of interest to the humanities. DH is the result of a dynamic dialogue between emerging technology and humanistic inquiry…”
This a description of DH is taken from a 2016 American Libraries Association Special Report on Digital Humanities. It’s as concise a definition as you’re likely to find, because scholars have such varying ideas about DH. A Day of DH event compiled 817 different definitions; follow this link to read a few.
With the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, librarians, humanities scholars, technologists, and the general public have all become engaged in an intense dialogue about artificial intelligence and what it means for humans, and for the humanities. The tools and methods that undergird large language models like ChatGPT have long been used by digital humanities practitioners. Natural language processing, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, etc., are all implicated in what is now rolled up and called AI. Alongside learning how these technologies work and how we might apply them to humanities scholarship, DH practitioners – and UWM Libraries DH Services – place enormous importance on understanding the history of AI, and how literature, philosophy, creative work, and information networks have anticipated and inform our current discussions. Evidence of this new(ish) area of emphasis can be seen in the National Endowment for the Humanities launch of its Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence program in 2023, or in a recent special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly focused on visual AI for archives. Here at UWM, we are partnering with the Center for 21st Century Studies and its AI and the Humanities Collaboratory (2024-26) to investigate the implications of AI for the humanities in higher education.
Articles
- Debates in Digital Humanities book series. (2012-ongoing) Published as an ongoing series, this open access digital book series explores myriad themes in the Digital Humanities, with the first edition published in 2012. The latest edition is 2023 with more coming.
- On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? (2021) by Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. Though not technically “DH”, this article is foundational for understanding LLMs and some of the possible risks.
- “What is Digital Humanities and what’s it doing in English Departments? (2010) by Matthew Kirschenbaum. Another foundational text explaining how DH got legs, and what it is or could be about.
- “What is Digital Humanities and what’s it doing in the Library?” (2012) by Micah Vandegrift
- Library Collections as Humanities Data: The Facet Effect (2014) by Thomas G. Padilla and Devin Higgins. This article explains what constitutes data for DH researchers – and lays a foundation for “collections-as-data” initiatives.
- How did they make that? Reverse Engineering Digital Projects (2013) by Miriam Posner. This classic blog post from 2013 is still a good place to start if you’re looking for some exemplary DH projects and some ideas about methodology.
Conferences
- Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
- Digital Library Federation Forum
- This annual forum focuses on digital libraries, archives, and museums. It’s especially relevant to academic librarians involved with digital libraries and preservation, and digital initiatives.
- Electronic Literature Organization
- This international organization is devoted to the continually developing, continually evolving field of “the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media”, and hosts an annual conference.
- Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC)
- Annual HASTAC conferences are hosted by affiliate organizations at locations around the globe.