RELI/ENGL 39, Fall 2015, University of the Pacific

Defining digital humanities ….

According to one of the required articles I read for the reading the author says “It is imperative that digital humanities work take into account the important insights of disability studies in the humanities, an interdisciplinary field that considers disability not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do.” Digital humanities is becoming increasingly popular as far as focus. There are now hundreds of digital humanities centers worldwide and the digital humanities subject is taught in at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Yet, there’s no solidity yet in defining digital humanities. The first article, “The Digital Humanities is not about Building it’s about Sharing” by Mark Sample was very similar to te title of the article. Sample believed that in Digital Humanities, knowledge is not produced and is shared and reproduced.

The term is much debated and has not yet fully established its identity due to the fact that researchers are still continuously finding more and more things they can do with DH tools and methods. So just because no one really knows the exact definition, we still may have an idea.  There are many different outlooks and and opinions about how people define the term digital humanities. I don’t believe that there is a right or wrong answer as to what you think digital humanities is, it’s more of what you get out of it. After just a couple weeks of being in class I’m still not exactly sure what DH is but thus far my outlook on digital humanities is that it expresses the fields of computer science, an area of research. Digital humanities gathers information from articles published over the past 10 or so years and explores the digital humanities field. DH looks at current and past events.

 

 

Ahmanni S.

1 Comment

  1. Andrew J. Rocha

    I think you have the write idea, especially the part about “gathering information” and looking at “current and past events”. But I just want to mention how the Digital Humanities differs from the Humanities with the use of technology and algorithms.The Humanities is about examining humanity through art and history, but I think that the Digital Humanities takes all of that and merges it with modern technology.

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