The Role of Technology
Prof. Stephen Ramsay, a fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, argues that digital humanists are involved in the activity of building, an activity which he (provocatively) implies distinguishes those that “do” digital humanities and those that do not. He emphasizes that although coding is a worthwhile activity for digital humanists, building is different from programming, or coding, or developing software or algorithms. He also says that Alan Liu (see above) does not self-consciously describe himself as a builder, but nonetheless earns that designation from his tool building, evidenced by the “grease under his fingernails” (Ramsay, 2016a).
He states: “All the technai of Digital Humanities — data mining, [XML] encoding, text analysis, [GIS], Web design, visualization, programming, tool design, database design, etc — involve building; only a few of them require programming, per se. Only a radical subset of the [DH] community knows how to code; nearly all are engaged in building something” (Ramsay, 2016a).
Another definition that emphasizes the variety of the discipline follows (Garcia-Peñalvo, 2016):
“Digital humanities is the research area at the intersection between computing and the broad variety of humanities disciplines. There is not a unique definition of what digital humanities is. Kathie Gosset defines digital humanities as ‘an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of digital work in the humanities: development of multimedia pedagogies and scholarship, designing and building tools, human computer interaction, designing and building archives, and so on.’ DH is interdisciplinary; by necessity it breaks down boundaries between disciplines at the local (e.g., English and history) and global (e.g., humanities and computer sciences) levels”, while Mark Tebeau defines it as “a collaborative, open, and emerging field of inquiry. A state of mind, a methodology, and theoretical approach to knowledge, it forces us to reconceive our practice. In my own work, I embrace curation as a means of reweaving and reintegrating theory and practice in history. I seek to interpret space, place, and identity in a multi-sensory way. I fail more often than not. But the digital humanities is like jazz in that it is about process, as well as outcome” (Gold & others, 2012), cited in (Garcia-Peñalvo, 2016)).
This definition encapsulates the interdisciplinarity and collaborative nature of digital humanities work, especially the intersection of “technical” areas of computer science (and computation in general) and mathematics (including statistics) and traditional humanities disciplines. It also alludes to interdisciplinarity within the humanities (e.g. English and history).
In terms of technology:
“[…the Digital Humanities] move beyond a privileging of the textual, emphasizing graphical methods of knowledge production and organization, design as an integral component of research, transmedia crisscrossing, and an expanded concept of the sensorium humanistic knowledge […] characterized by an intensified focus on building transferrable tools, environments, and platforms for collaborative scholarly work […] and an emphasis upon curation as a defining feature of scholarly practice.” (Lugmayr & Teras, 2015), quoting (Burdick et al., 2012))
However, Lugmayr suspects that this definition may be overly-restrictive and expands it (Lugmayr & Teras, 2015),. DH is essentially a response to innovations in digital technology and computation for analysis of humanities knowledge. These computing technologies and tools are used to create new artefacts, and DH focuses on researching these new artefacts vis-à-vis human constructs. Emerging technologies can be leveraged to expand human capabilities, and it is necessary to investigate how of humanistic knowledge – defined by [Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary] “human constructs, concerns, social relations, and the quality of being human” – relates to artefacts created in the physical world, as well as digitally. A major task of DH is therefore, through interdisciplinary humanities and computer science research, to identify and apply a computational tools and techniques to formulate new “humanistic concepts, knowledge, experience, and extension of human capabilities”. His formal definition is given as follows (Lugmayr & Teras, 2015):
“[Digital Humanities is the] [i]nvestigation of humanistic knowledge – defined by [2] “human constructs, concerns, social relations, and the quality of being human” – created in the analogue as well as digital domain by identifying and applying a generalized toolset of computational technologies, methods, and tools through a cross-disciplinary humanities-computer science research approach to create new humanistic concepts, knowledge, experience, and extension of human capabilities.”