What is Digital Humanities?

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What is Digital Humanities?

Hello again, since we have already been introduced, I will dive into my thoughts so far on what Digital Humanities is. Last time in my introduction I gave a brief explanation of what I thought Digital Humanities was and now I am going to go more into dept and expound on the idea. Today I will also evaluate a Digital Humanities Project to give a better understanding of Digital humanities on a general level.

Digital Humanities is how we gather information, study that information, and the findings or conclusions that we come to after the interpretation of all the knowledge we have gained using digital tools. Digital tools can be any platform on the internet where one can use to upload information or use information that was already on the internet like online videos, images, still and moving texts, etc., and then it is posted as a Digital Humanities Project. This platform, Blogger.com, is one example of platforms where you will find Digital Projects.

From what I have gathered the concept of Digital Humanities projects has three main components along with its many characteristics. These components are information, digital tools, and people. You will find that every Digital Humanities project is in some digital form or it uses some form of digital tool hence the name Digital Humanities. This provides easy and free access to projects that aren’t usually easy to access from the luxury of your home or where ever you might be. You just need to have a device connected to the internet and you can access them. All Digital Humanities Project provides some form of information from at least one area on the humanities that requires different forms of research and analysis to gather the right information and organize it according to the point they want to prove or whatever the purpose of the project is. Now people play a very important part in all of this because they are the ones coming together to collaborate to form these Digital Humanities Projects and they are also the people on the receiving end. They are the ones that these projects were made for so that they can access them and the information that the projects have; gain the knowledge provided by the project and form their own understanding of the project. Also, you will find that some of the projects become studies that eventually develop technologies to benefit us as humans. However, there are a lot of Digital Humanities projects that are unfinished or work in progress, or the information that they provided needs to be updated.

The Digital Humanities project we will be looking at today is called PixPlot provided by Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab. When studying this project, you will realize that it is easily accessible and free. This project includes areas of humanities such as art and history because we can see that the project includes “cultural heritage images held in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale Center for British Art, and the Medical Historical Library” (Yale DHLab).  Again, these are not easily accessible otherwise like they are online on in these projects. When you browse through the project the pictures are mapped in a specific format where pictures that are related, for example, photos that included boxers were grouped together in hotspots in the entire cluster along with other similar photos. This means that the project is multi-modal because it involves more than one form of information or critique. The photos are curated around photos from the “Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale Center for British Art, and the Medical Historical Library” (Yale DHLab). The project looks as if it contains over 27,000 photos to achieve its 2,048 dimensions and it seems as if it wasn’t a work of just one person as they kept on referring to themselves as “we”, so it was definitely collaborative.

I would have to say that the project is very interactive since it allows you to navigate through all the pictures and very experimental since this is not something that is very common. And form the overview of the project there will be some updates on the projects to come.

What I want to know now is, is there anything else to Digital Humanities that I’m yet to find out? What drives people to Digital Humanities Project? How difficult is it to collaborate with others to develop these projects? Is it costly? I’m sure you have some questions or concerns or simply some comments, feel free to state your thoughts in the comments and I will address them as soon as possible.

Again stay safe and until next time.

~See You Soon~


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