For me, DH represents an encapsulation of man made items to create and collaborate with other cultures in order to document and preserve humanity’s creations. Let’s elaborate on this. DH allows for collaboration to places and people previously thought to be inaccessible. This is due to the “Digital” part of Digital Humanities. This new era of digitizing has given people a widespread reach not only to communicate but also to understand ideas and give answers that were only available to academics or independent cultures at one time or another. This reach can then lead to a group of people from different backgrounds to come together and create new projects in order to document and preserve these older ideas and answers with newer technologies. However, DH does not just represent older areas. New ideas for DH are being come up with every day which helps to have an ever evolving meaning and purpose for DH. It is important to recognize the ephemeral nature of DH as this is at its very core. DH in and of itself is a very new subject only created within the past few decades with the expanse of the Internet.
A curious question that has arisen for me is what discipline DH would be posed under, or is it now it’s own separate field? For me, DH reads as a subfield of Cultural Anthropology. Now, do I realise that this would give me a lot of heat just by others in Gettysburg’s Anthropology department? Absolutely. But let’s look at the similarities. The purpose of Cultural Anthropology according to Britannica is, “the study of culture in all of its aspects and that uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world.” While this definition does not encapsulate everything both DH and Cultural Anthropology does, many similarities can be drawn between the two. They both study culture in some way along with using very similar methods and concepts with a combination of linguistics that combines the diverse peoples around the world. To me, this is the easiest way to understand DH as it combines a field that I am familiar with while also expounding upon and bringing that subject further into the digital. Again, I do recognise these are slightly fighting words, but DH seems to have a different meaning and classification for everyone, so what does DH actually stand for? I don’t think there will ever be one solid answer to this question.
DH, like the Internet, is going to constantly evolve and become more prevalent as the Digital Age continues. This can be a very good thing if used wisely, but like all things on the Internet that has to be said with a grain of salt. That being said, I am excited to see where DH ends up and expect to help be a part of that evolution even in the small time I am working in the field.
One reply on “What is DH?”
It’s an interesting connection between cultural anthropology and DH. I’m a big fan of narrative, storytelling, and cultural questions in DH, so this is a thread worth pursuing. There’s a book chapter about this as well, so seeing if I can get a copy! And please, continue to evolve and push against the definition(s) because it’s not worth standing still for.