Introduction
The sciences, physical or social, work on a very strong premise of cause-effect and therefore
the simple task of defining their field becomes rather simple. However, for the laymen and
even for any professional the task of giving humanities strict definitional boundaries is
uphill, to say the least. From our noble beginnings, we have covered a journey of
abstractions from humanism to humanities to the contemporary times of digital humanities.
And parallel to this journey the world was changing which mandated the scholars &
professionals to adapt in order to sustain. The change from handwritten scholarship to
automated algorithms, from the manual nature of research to more methods of answering
research questions with technology and data, from the pre-industrial revolution to the
information-technology revolution.
The jargons of history, of sociology, of leaders and scholars often takes the layman for a
journey. There will be questions like is the technology in humanities determinative? How
would you differentiate between digital humanities and humanities computing? Social
Sciences were already using an objective, data-driven methodology and if the boundaries
humanities and social sciences are permeable then what is the drastic change in
understanding that has happened for us to make such keen scrutiny of digital humanities?
Understanding
While the digital and computers have notions in the binary, the answer to the
aforementioned questions aren’t binary. We are dealing with the evolution of a field, not
the discovery of one. Anne Burdick, a digital humanist, if I may, capture the idea quite aptly
in her book, Digital Humanities. She & her co-authors understand DH in this rather inclusive
and elementary forward wherein they ask and understand “what it means to be a human
being in the networked information age and to participate in fluid communities of practice,
asking and answering research questions that cannot be reduced to a single genre, medium,
discipline, or institution. what it means to be a human being in the networked information
age and to participate in fluid communities of practice, asking and answering research
questions that cannot be reduced to a single genre, medium, discipline, or institution.”
Let us go back to Anne Burdick being a digital humanist. She’s not the only one. In fact,
despite my limited exposure to the world of professional research, I can confidently state
that most, if not all, humanities scholars are digital humanities as of this moment – in this
time and age. Such has been the evolution as I had mentioned previously. Anyone who is
engaged with language, literature, art etc is continuously and quite involuntarily affected by
the digital & IT age.
Paraphrasing & Conclusion
Examples of operational usage of DH will surely help. Imagine the scope of the augmented
reality in creating or reconstructing imagery of architectural marvels or of erstwhile
monuments that have been withered with time. Or the scope of using Big Data to compute
a multitude of information/facts and evaluating them with different parameters. The
limitations of this assignment bound us from delving deeper but such examples help us
gauge the scope. Digital Humanities is not a theoretical framework that is to abided by but
could understand as a newer, practical approach which has greatly impacted the way
research is conducted, information is collected and stored, the way data is aggregated, the
way authors engage in using and publishing their research. Digital Humanities have simply
evolved the way we interact with our fields of study and our community wherein we make
this interaction.
When talking one’s understanding of a concept, here the digital humanities, the sheer flow
of explanation brings with it the risk of getting redundant. Hence to conclude, one could
understand DH as the amalgamation of the traditional humanities with computational
methods of the digital age that have aided approaches and have enabled the growth of
research in terms of quality and efficiency.
References
Burdick, A. Et al. (2012). Digital Humanities. The MIT Press, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
Gardiner, E & Musto, R.G. (2015) The Digital Humanities. Cambridge University Press
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