Defining Digital Humanities Scholarship

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Smiljana Antonijević, whose interest is in the emerging field of the digital humanities. How did this field come to be imagined? It's founding story is generally associated with the Jesuit priest Roberto Busa and his interest in using digital technologies for information management; this gradually developed into humanities computing or linguistic computing. The arrival of personal computing further broadened this, and the term digital humanities finally emerged in the mid-1990s.

Digital humanities has been visible especially in digital mapping of specific geographic sites. In developing literature databases, and in other key uses; there are now a set of imaginaries and expectations for the intersection between digital technologies and the humanities. This may also limit opportunists, however.

Digital humanities remains a portly defined term, however, and few scholars currently agree on a definition. Some in the digital humanities community are attempting to position it as a leader in the uses of digital technologies in humanities research, from a variety of perspectives; on the other hand, some definitions of digital humanities proceed largely by drawing boundaries and defining who is and especially who is not a digital humanities scholar.

What transforms a mainstream humanist into a digital one, then? Is it the use of digital technologies? The creation of digital objects and artefacts? Even so, are we not all digital humanities researchers by now? One way to move past this impasse is to observe actual humanities researchers in action, and understand how they work and how their practices are transforming.

Many scholars constantly interact with digital technologies in their work, in fact, without explicitly defining themselves as digital humanists. There may be a useful distinction here between digital scholarship in the humanities, and digital humanities scholarship in a narrower sense. The former runs the gamut from simple to complex computational work, and transformations in the ways of knowing define such scholarship. This is a profound shift, and our approach to it needs to be inclusive