Since attempting to define Digital Humanities for the first time, this course has heretofore demonstrated just how multifaceted the term can be in meanings, forms, purposes, and of course, the innumerable peoples and professions involved. Now, as I continue to work on my own contributions through a digital humanities project, I can see that my earlier definition decently captured the idea of digital humanities but did not effectively convey its scope. In a broadest sense, I would still define Digital Humanities as an interdisciplinary method of practice at the juncture between traditional humanities and modern digital tools. The earlier definition’s idea gathered from scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum in the course reading that DH is “methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope” is still true, but in my view it accounts for less of what DH actually does in practice (Module 2.3.1). The idea behind this earlier definition did not properly account for the actual possibilities of ways in which it is used or forms that it can take, and the course examples of data mapping, text mining, and network analysis illustrate just some of the ways that digital tools effect not only how information is gathered but how it is presented and how people understand it. In essence, a central facet of digital humanities omitted by my original definition is that the field is not just the usage of digital tools for traditional means, but it is also a study itself of how those digital tools are used and how they effect data itself. This still makes DH difficult to truly define, but ironically a good summation of this principle, as well as an example of DH crowdsourcing, can be found from the course activity with Wikipedia’s article on DH, which notes that it operates under “the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution” (Wikipedia). After studying the long editorial process of creating an article like this one, one of many examples of how DH is used to present and transform information, it is clear that any definition of DH needs to effectively communicate that it is both a method of study and a study itself of the digital age, and of the way in which modern society interacts with the tools it creates and uses. One thing is still relevant from the original definition: that modern society continues to digitize more and more aspects of life, from interpersonal communication to education and political discourse – almost every aspect of the dissemination of modern information is done at least somewhat digitally, and thus DH will continue to be an important field of study as it continues to expand and transform with the times.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities