Digital Scholarship and the Digital Humanities
It is clear that the humanities are becoming more “digital” due to the shift from analog to digital, which necessitates the use of digital methods. However, the digital humanities, if it is to remain vibrant, must maintain its humanities focus. In this respect, the digital humanities are not considered as a new paradigm, but in addition to enhancing existing methods which are now done in new ways, stimulate new ways of thinking about the traditional and standard practices of the humanities. In other words, the digital humanities have radically changed humanities scholarship , but does not radically change the questions, methods, and aims of the humanities themselves. For instance, computational technology has facilitated the development and adoption of distant reading, in which many texts or large corpora are analyzed with advanced methods and visualization. Such analysis was not possible without computational tools. However, these advances have not fundamentally altered the questions that humanists investigate. Although some subdisciplines of the humanities will not necessarily morph into digital versions, they will likely be affected and influenced by the fact that the materials they work with will increasingly be digitized, born-digital, or reborn-digital, and that digital methods and tools will be used to analyze and interpret these materials
As media studies scholar Niels Brügger puts it: “…in the 21st century the difference between the humanities and the Digital Humanities is quantitative rather than qualitative: all parts of the humanities will become digital to some extent, but not all will become digital to the same extent. Thus, the main question is not one of being digital or not, but rather one of being more or less digital” (Brügger, 2016).
