What is Digital Humanities?
Ever since Digital Humanities (DH) emerged as a field in the early 2000s [1], there have been debates over the definition, or even existence, of DH as a distinct scholarly discipline [2]. Following a period of heated exchange on this topic, and amidst accusations that DH was a trojan horse for neoliberal forces in academia, Matthew Kirschenbaum argued for an embrace of DH as “a discursive construct:”
“The agon par excellence of the construct is of course the question of definition: what is digital humanities? The insistence on the question is what allows the construct to do its work, to function as a space of contest for competing agendas. But more importantly—and this is precisely where the logic of the construct most readily reveals itself—there is no actual shortage of definitions of digital humanities.” (51)
In this view, it is precisely the contested terrain that DH occupies which allows it to be a generative site of scholarship. This transdisciplinarity is partially why I locate my own research within DH.
DH breaches walls both within and outside of the academy. While there is often an assumption that DH is the application of computational tools in humanistic inquiry, Kathleen Fitzpatrick notes an equally important side of DH: “The bringing humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on digital media.” Intersecting with the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI), DH brings a critical and contextual lens to the creation and study of digital technologies, disrupting notions of these technologies’ objectivity and lack of historicity [3].
When I think of DH, I think of projects such as Mapping Inequality, The Quipu Project, Colored Conventions, and Torn Apart/Separados. These projects demonstrate what María Cotera calls “the radical potential” of DH: the ability to collectively build knowledge outside of the academy and thereby dismantle epistemological hierarchies. However, Cotera crucially notes that this radical potential is not inherent to DH work; a critical approach is necessary, one that is attentive to how legacies of white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy are imbued in digital technologies and the humanities. Critical digital humanities does this work, bringing postcolonial and critical race, ethnic, and gender studies to bear on the creation, study, and use of technology.
I situate my own work within this lineage, looking to work by scholars such as Moya Bailey and Jessica Marie Johnson as touchstones. Both Bailey and Johnson critique the use of data in digital humanities research, with Johnson noting how historians’ datafication of enslaved people reinscribes slavery’s violent dehumanization and quantification of Black people. Bailey writes about the harm in using social media data without consent, particularly when that data was created by marginalized people. Bailey calls for a digital humanities research ethic of “collaborative construction” that centers ongoing consent. These calls to view the humanity underlying data are particularly pronounced in feminist DH scholarship. As the authors of the Feminist Data Manifest-No succinctly put it:
“We refuse to understand data as disembodied and thereby dehumanized and departicularized. We commit to understanding data as always and variously attached to bodies; we vow to interrogate the biopolitical implications of data with a keen eye to gender, race, sexuality, class, disability, nationality, and other forms of embodied difference.”
The bodies of scholarship cited above indicate the various overlaps between the humanities and social sciences that are found under the umbrella of DH. An additional, and particularly significant overlap for me, is in the shared space of DH and archival studies. Archival studies, which is the study of the creation, organization, management, and use of archival records, is my disciplinary home. As archival practice has necessarily entailed a greater engagement with the digital, the study of digital archives has generated important critiques on what the affordances and limitations of these projects [4]. However, as Michelle Caswell and Itza Carbajal argue, while humanists increasingly create digital archives, they are often unaware of the choices (or lack of choices) they are making in doing this work. Their call for “critical digital archives” can be read as a call for greater crosspollination between digital humanities and archival studies. Given the shifting discursive construction of DH, there is plenty of room for this engagement.
It is the combination of these theoretical perspectives from the humanities, archival studies, STS, and HCI that constitutes DH. These theories intermix and inform a range of methodological approaches. Research methods commonly associated with DH include text analysis, data visualization, network mapping, and digital mapping. Other scholars engage with DH primarily to disseminate their research, such as in the creation of digital collections, exhibits, or publications. Each method comes with its own toolbox, which is constantly evolving. Indeed, another core contribution of DH is to provide cultural, historical, and sociological context for ever-emergent technologies.
[1] In their introduction to a recent digital humanities reader, Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte trace the emergence of the term “digital humanities” to the 2005 launch of Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations, although they also note that scholarship that we would now classify as digital humanities has a much longer history.
[2] The website https://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/ displays this variety of definitions.
[3] See, for example: Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Medford, MA: Polity, 2019); Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression : How Search Engines Reinforce Racism / Safiya Umoja Noble. New York: New York University Press.
[4] See for example: Michelle Caswell and Samip Mallick, “Collecting the Easily Missed Stories: Digital Participatory Microhistory and the South Asian American Digital Archive,” Archives and Manuscripts 42, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 73–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.880931; Isto Huvila, “Participatory Archive: Towards Decentralised Curation, Radical User Orientation, and Broader Contextualisation of Records Management,” Archival Science 8, no. 1 (March 2008): 15–36, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-008-9071-0; Tonia Sutherland, “Making a Killing: On Race, Ritual, and (Re) Membering in Digital Culture,” Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture 46, no. 1 (2017): 32–40.