Digital Humanities is …
an innovative and creative field that combines knowledge of the humanities with emerging technologies. It examines the culture, stories, history, and art of communities to ask questions and generate ideas. As Matthew K. Gold puts it, DH has been developing over the years into a field of ‘socially oriented work’ (Gold, A DH That Matters). And we can track this development by engaging with the researcher’s comprehensive collections, Debates in Digital Humanities. From a field focused on establishing its own definition and finding its rightful place among more traditional academic scholarship; through loosening strict approaches of “The Big Tent”‘s “who’s in and who’s out”, by perceiving itself as “the expanded field” of relationships between its key concepts, and the possibilities they create; to stepping outside of the university walls by ‘engage[ing] the world outside academy’; to currently being oriented towards responding to pressing world issues and creating possibilities for inclusive futures.
An example of such a project could be Shakespeare and Company, which brings to the world a digitised (and therefore accessible) archive compiled by Sylvia Beach. These are library cards of (not only) famous writers and artists who held memberships at the Paris bookshop and lending library in the inter-war years. The public can, for example, browse the books that Gertrude Stein or Simone de Beauvoir read and engage with them themselves. It could also lead researchers engaging with it to create new, interesting projects that track influences on a particular author’s ideas in their publications. However, as we discussed in class, such a project also leads us to question whether such data should and can be made public. What about privacy? Wouldn’t James Joyce have wanted to keep his library card private?
That’s what interests me most in Digital Humanities. It is a way of creative reflecting on the current state of the world, in which our lives are becoming increasingly computerised and digitised. It is about two-way, collaborative approaches, in which communities and the public inform scholars’ work, and scholars foster critical thinking about emerging cultural and digital phenomena. But, most importantly for me, I see at the core of the DH, its commitment to asking critical questions regarding the world around us and the emerging technologies within it.
