Three Types of Digital Material: Digitized, Born-digital, and Reborn-digital
Digitized Material
Born-Digital Material
Born-digital material is any media that has always existed in digital form, and where there is no corresponding analog material. Examples include DVD and the Internet.
Reborn-Digital Material
The category of digitized/digital material has large implications for their use in digital humanities scholarship, as particular characteristics of each of digital material influences how they are understood and used by researchers (Brügger, 2016).
The decade of the 1960s saw the inception of humanities computing, computational linguistics, and digital history. At this stage, the digitized material was the main focus of investigation, which was facilitated by large mainframe computers, and later, by networked computers.
Born-digital material, or material that was digital at the outset, was the focus in the 1990s, an era in which New Media Studies and Internet Studies came into being. These two fields of study are sometimes not considered to be part of digital humanities proper, but are understood to be such if focus on the humanistic components of new media or the Internet, respectively.
In the early 2000s, historically inflected subfields of Internet studies arose, where the archived web and other preserved born-digital material became objects of investigation. Consequently, the focus became reborn-digital material (Brügger, 2016).
