Tools and Building
Closely related to the concept of tools is the purpose of tools, which is building. Stephen Ramsay, a fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, argues that digital humanists must be involved in the activity of building, an activity which he (provocatively) implies distinguishes those that “do” digital humanities and those that do not. He distinguishes programming (or “coding”) from software development and designing algorithms, concluding that coding is a worthwhile and increasingly necessary activity for digital humanists. He gives the example of another widely known digital humanities scholar, Alan Liu, who does not self-consciously describe himself as a builder, but nonetheless is heavily involved in tool building, as evidenced by the “grease under his fingernails” (Ramsay, 2016).
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, 2016).
