Refining the Definitions
Stephen Ramsay of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln summarizes the conversation as follows: “…the term can mean anything from media studies to electronic art, from data mining to edutech, from scholarly annotating to anarchic blogging, while inviting code junkies, digital artists, standards wonks, transhumanists, game theorists, free culture advocates, archivists, librarians, and edupunks under its capacious canvas” (Ramsay, 2016b)
Another pertinent question is: What is the field known as the “humanities”? It can be defined as the science (field of knowledge) involved with “investigat[ing] human constructs and concerns […] social relations” and “quality or state of being human” (Lugmayr & Teras, 2015), quoting from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary). An older definition is given as follows:
“We define humanities as broadly as possible. Our interests include literature of all times and countries, music, the visual arts, folklore, the non-mathematical aspects of linguistics, and all the phases of the social sciences that stress the humane. when, for example, the archaeologist is concerned with fine arts of the past, when the sociologist studies the non-material facets of culture, when the linguist analyzes poetry, we may define their intentions as humanistic; if they employ computers, we wish to encourage them and to learn from them.”
(Prospect, 1966, p. 1) quoted in Terras, Nyhan & Vanhoutte eds. Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader (2013) Introduction p. 3.
This definition, from 1966, resulted from Joseph Raben, professor of English at Queens College in the City University of New York, founding the seminal journal Computers and the Humanities, a seminal journal devoted to research on the application of computational methods to humanities scholarship, and what was to become the first journal in the “digital humanities”, although the term was not used at the time. The definition was in the “Prospect” of the journal’s first issue.
The next logical question is: What is meant by the term “digital”? In the context of computer science, digital refers to a “digit”, meaning that computers internally represent discrete quantities, and not continuous ones. However, in popular parlance, the term is associated with anything related to digital computers (as opposed to “analog” machines). The idea of digitality, or the specific “way of being digital”, is that the common, unifying factor in all digital technologies and digital fields of study, including the digital humanities, is the discrete, binary code, in which codes are written with the binary digits 0 and 1. These two digits should be understood as characters rather than as numbers. Based on the characterization of Dartmouth University digital humanities scholar Aden Evens, the digital computer is characterized by a mechanical alphabet – in this case the binary code – in which each character has no meaning in itself, an syntax for expressing algorithms which is expressed by combinations of the two characters, and an interface providing semantics to the syntax, in the form of computational devices that work with the alphabet and algorithmic syntax (Evens, 2012). In this respect, the computer can be viewed as a “writing machine” in which texts are composed of the “letters” of the binary code (Brügger, 2016).
Returning briefly to the second word in the phrase, humanities, it is seen that this word also eludes a straightforward definition. Therefore, instead of a textbook definition, and following Niels Brügger, Professor of Media Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark, the humanities will be described with four themes that are addressed in various attempts at a definition (Brügger, 2016).
First, boundaries are established; that is, what is in the humanities, and what is outside of it. In particular, questions concerning whether a discipline is in the humanities or in the social sciences arise when one considers subjects such as anthropology, law, or communication. Even areas that are superficially distinct from the “humanities”, such as medicine or cognitive sciences, can inhabit an area in which a clear-cut distinction from the humanities is difficult.
The next question is to whether there are identifiable objects of study in the humanities with theories and methods that are common among all humanities disciplines.
A very important aspect of the humanities is its aims, or end goals, whether they advance human progress and culture, whether they are simply descriptive, or whether they provide a utilitarian function.
Finally, the humanities are to a large part delimited by the division of higher education into faculties and administrative divisions. In other words, one is a humanities scholar by being part institutionally affiliated with a department, faculty, or school of the humanities.
Combining these ideas leads to a complementary definition of the digital humanities which relates the digital humanities to its digital sources as described above, and is again provided by Niels Brügger:
Humanities (regardless of what is understood by “humanities”) which to some extent use digital computers and thereby shape the invariant traits of the computer to fit specific scholarly needs, based on how they define themselves as “humanities,” their research questions and their practices (Brügger, 2016).
The “invariant traits” in this definition refer to three defining characteristics of the computer: its binary alphabet of 0s and 1s, its algorithmic syntax for constructing “tasks” for the computer with this alphabet, and the interface between human user and machine.