See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/342692665

Digital Humanities-An Introduction

Preprint · July 2020

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.22411.72485

CITATION READS

1 5,113

1 author:

Preeti Oza
St. Andrew’s College of Arts, Science and Commerce - University of Mumbai
206 PUBLICATIONS 164 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Preeti Oza on 04 July 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Digital Humanities- An Introduction
Dr. Preeti Oza
St. Andrew‟s College
University of Mumbai

Abstract:

The use of computers to analyze research data in arts and humanities disciplines such as
literature and history dates back to the 1940s. The digital humanities also referred to
as humanities computing, maybe a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned
with the intersection of computing and therefore the disciplines of the humanities. It is a
study that is methodological naturally and interdisciplinary in scope. It involves investigation,
analysis, synthesis and presentation of data in electronic form. It studies how these media
affect the disciplines during which they're used, and what these disciplines need to contribute
to our knowledge of computing. This paper elaborates the concept of Digital Humanities, its
origin and development.

Key-words: Digital Humanities, Computation of data, Digitalization

Introduction:

Digital Humanities is a broad field of research and scholarly activity covering not
only the use of digital methods by arts and humanities researchers and collaboration by
Digital Humanities specialists with computing and scientific disciplines but also how the arts
and humanities offer distinctive insights into the major social and cultural issues raised by the
development of digital technologies. Work in this field is necessarily collaborative, involving
multiple skills, disciplines, and areas of expertise.

The use of computers to analyze research data in arts and humanities disciplines such
as literature and history dates back to the 1940s. The University of Cambridge was a pioneer
in the development of humanities computing, with the establishment in 1964 of the Literary
and Linguistic Computing Centre under the chairmanship of Roy Wisbey. The emphasis in
these early days was on the potential of the computer to facilitate the creating and sorting of
large concordances and thesauri of historical texts. The work of pioneers such as Wisbey led
to the growth during the 1970s and 1980s of an international community of specialists in
humanities computing across a range of disciplines, who focused on the development of
computational methods to accommodate the complex and varied structures found in the
primary materials used by humanities scholars. ( www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/cdh/what-is-dh)

The digital humanities also referred to as humanities computing, maybe a field of

study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and
therefore the disciplines of the humanities. It is a study that is methodological naturally and
interdisciplinary in scope. It involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of
data in electronic form. It studies how these media affect the disciplines during
which they're used, and what these disciplines need to contribute to our knowledge of
computing.

When one talks about the internet, it is a myth that English is the language which rules. In the
lawless land of internet, language transients the border. It overcomes conventional
grammatical rules. It takes shape into internet specific slang and overall revolutionalizes
linguistic rules. The millennials are the most important change-makers in the linguistic world
which occurs in today's internet marketing. Current generation grew up with the computers
and the internet by their side and they have also developed a special language, dialect, and
slang of English. The age-old grammar Nazi attitude is shaken and stirred by this young
generation and they have taken many advanced steps in the creation of tone and pitch to
convey emotions by experimenting with traditional English grammar and mixing and
merging it with local languages like Hindi or regional languages like Gujarati Marathi or
Tamil. (Oza, 2019)
Although the term “digital humanities” has been floating around for over a decade, a
particular definition is difficult to pin down. Debates over the way to describe the sector and
mark its borders predate the label itself. Still, some kind of definition is required to
maneuver forward. Numerous Digital Humanities related books and journals choose working
definitions while acknowledging that a static definition can‟t fully explain the nuances of an
evolving field of study. Here are excerpts from several working definitions of Digital
Humanities that serve for instance the various and dynamic nature of the field:

 “Digital humanities may be a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the
practice of humanities research in and thru information technology, and therefore
 the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with
technology, media, and computational methods.”(Digital Humanities Quarterly
2010)
 “Digital Humanities refers to new modes of scholarship and institutional units for
collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and
publication. Digital Humanities is less a unified field than an array of convergent
practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the primary medium in
which knowledge is produced and disseminated. Digital Humanities.” (Burdick et al
2012)
 “The digital humanities, then, and their interdisciplinary core found in the field of
humanities computing, have a long and dynamic history best illustrated by an
examination of the locations at which specific disciplinary practices intersect with
computation.” (Schreibman et al 2004)

When the world of Digital Humanities first introduced, it had been called “humanities
computing,” and while people agreed on a couple of elements of a creation story, there was
no coherent account of where this “new” field came from. Over the years, it developed
into the many events leading up to the present state of Digital Humanities.
Digital Humanities isn't a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a
universe during which :

1. The print is not any longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which
knowledge is produced and/or disseminated; instead, print finds itself absorbed into
new, multimedia configurations; and
2. Digital tools, techniques, and media have altered the assembly and dissemination of
data within the arts, human and social sciences.

The founder father of the word „Digital Humanities‟, Padre Roberto Busa, was an Italian
Jesuit who began working with Thomas Watson, CEO of IBM, in 1949, on a punch-card
concordance of the works of Aquinas. Fifty-five years later, Father Busa contributed the
foreword to the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities (the publication that
introduced the term “Digital Humanities” into the tutorial vocabulary, in 2004).
 Understandably, given technology trends over that fifty-five years, Father Busa saw the
history of digital humanities as a history of miniaturization:

“I began, in 1949, with only electro-countable machines with punched cards. My goal
was to possess a file of 13 million of those cards, one for every word, with a context of 12
lines stamped on the rear. The file would are 90 meters long, 1.20 m tall, 1 m thorough,
and would have weighed 500 tonnes. In His mercy, around 1955, God led men to
create magnetic tapes. the primary was the steel ones by Remington, closely followed by
the plastic ones of IBM. Until 1980, I used to be performing on 1,800 tapes, all 2,400 feet
long, and their combined length was 1,500 km, the space from Paris to Lisbon, or from
Milan to Palermo.”

Context of Digital Humanities as a field of study:

The expansion within the early 1990s of latest network technologies, including the
WWW, and the resulting ease with which non-textual files like images, sound, and moving
images might be created and shared led to a step-change within the engagement of the
humanities and humanities with digital technologies. Major projects were established to
supply large-scale digital editions and archives of texts and cultural artifacts from many
various periods and civilizations. Libraries, archives, and museums developed large-scale
digitization programs to facilitate remote access to their collections, while commercial
organizations like Google also began to digitize large parts of the western cultural heritage.
Moreover, this reconsideration of the connection of humanities scholars to their primary
materials wasn't restricted to digitization but also involved the utilization of other
technologies like Geographic Information Systems or 3D visualization. The work of
governments, writers and artists increasingly exist only in digital form, humanities scholars
also began to worry with methods of curating and researching born-digital data.

An immediate context for the expansion of Digital Humanities has been the steady
debate around a „crisis‟ of the disciplines, the humanities especially, and the way Digital
Humanities during a strange paradox, appeared to be both the phenomenon posing this
question and offering a solution thereto. Particularly within the Anglo-American context,
while there has been a sustained decline in funding for the humanities, especially post the
worldwide recession within the late 1990s, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math
(STEM) and other disciplines in natural sciences still seem to get on a gentle footing. The
„crisis‟ here exists at several levels - budgetary cuts across universities for humanistic
discipline and humanities programs, a steep fall in gainful employment for graduates (whose
numbers are far more than the roles available within the market, the adjunct system that has
become popular within the US, which has resulted in reduced full-time employment and poor
compensation for faculty, and generally a scarcity of opportunities and resources for
research within the arts and humanities. the matter, however, of which these are only the
symptoms, lies much deeper, at the guts of what's seen because of the lack of interest thanks
to the diminishing practical value of the humanities, which further makes them seem most
dispensable during a moment of depression. The complexity of digital humanities as a “field”
comes partly from its disciplinary and institutional diversity and its multiple modes of
engagement with information technology. watching a restricted field, presumably a part
of the digital humanities, Bell notes that the “ „field‟ of cyberculture (or whatever) studies is
diverse and heterodox, too undisciplined to be called a discipline” (Bell,2007).

Common Inquiries for the term ‘Digital Humanities’:

Many scholars have raised some basic questions/conflicts that appeared to be troubling
about this idea of Digital Humanities. a number of them are-

 Are „digital‟ and „humanities‟ really two contradictory terms that are being
bridged together? is that this a reiteration of the „two cultures‟?
 What are the changes within the object(s) of inquiry in humanities
disciplines thanks to the arrival of the web and digital technologies?
 What methods are to be used to study and work with digital objects?
 How are these affecting the normal methods of the humanities?
 Is Digital Humanities a fringe academic phenomenon, and may it's associated
with academic disciplines only?
 With several groups of practitioners engaging with questions and
methods like Digital Humanities outside universities, how can we define its
institutional boundaries?
 What are the new skills and tools emerging with, and successively defining,
Digital Humanities practices in general?
 While many of the normal humanities scholars should check out this because
the results of a particular techno capitalistic impulse - wherein a replacement research
regime supported knowledge creation to fulfill corporate interests emerges –
it's prudent to look at how and why fields just like the Digital Humanities have now
emerged around the time of such a crisis, as they seem to fit well within this nebulous
space, and what are their implications for the humanities, education, and research at
large. The introduction to the digital has been in multifarious ways for
countries within the global south, largely through the rhetoric about its potential to
deal with and even resolve social and economic problems, such a lot so that, as
several of the people interviewed during this study also mentioned, now anything
digital automatically translates to „good‟ and „beneficial‟. Addressing the digital
divide has been a mandate of all stakeholders, whether the state and policy-makers,
private organizations, NGOs or academia. With around 300 million internet users and
counting, India has the second-largest internet user base within the world. However,
the conditions and quality of access to the web and other digital technologies, and
who is using these and for what purposes remain a bone of contention. The ambitious
Digital India initiative of the present government is that the latest during a slew of
measures undertaken to deal with a number of these concerns within the last several
years, and it proposes to try to so by tackling three key areas – digital infrastructure,
governance and services on demand, and empowerment of citizens through increased
digital literacy. The arrival of a techno-democracy or a model of governance that
successfully integrates technology within a framework of rights and social
development seems to be a larger vision of those proposed initiatives.

History and Development of Digital Humanities in the Academic World:

1949-1970: Digital Humanities in Computing Centers:

 1949: Father Roberto Busa began his index of every word in the works of St. Thomas
Aquinas (11M words); visits Thomas Watson and enlists IBM
 1963: Roy Wisbey founded the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing in
Cambridge to support his work with Early Middle High German Texts.
 1966: Computers and the Humanities founded; Wilhelm Ott (developer of TUSTEP)
learns to program (http://www.allc.org/node/210); see also his early experiments in
“multimedia”: http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Ott.multimedia.mov
  1970: The first instance of what later became the Association for Literary and
Linguistic Computing conference is held at the University of Cambridge.
1973-1992: Digital Humanities and Scholarly Societies:
 1973: Founding of The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing
 1978: Founding of the Association for Computers and The Humanities
 1985: Perseus Project has begun at Harvard
 1986: Literary and Linguistic Computing founded
 1986: SGML specification released
 1987: Text-Encoding Initiative, Humanist has begun
 1989: First joint ACH/ALLC conference held in Toronto (at which Bob Kraft
demonstrates Ibycus, TLG, hypertext)
 1991: Electronic Beowulf Project
 1992: H-Net founded
1992-2004: Digital Humanities and Libraries:
 1992: Etext Center founded at Virginia by Kendon
Stubbs http://www.lib.virginia.edu/kls/text_only.html
 1993: Mosaic released, IATH founded at Virginia, STG founded at
Brown; EAD development begins at Berkeley.
 1994: First edition of the TEI guidelines; Center for History and New Media founded
 1996: The first draft of XML spec released (co-edited by the North American editor of
the TEI Guidelines); Digital Library Program founded at the University of
Michigan; SCETI founded at Penn
 1999: MITH founded
 2003: HASTAC founded
 2004: Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities
2005-2012: DH mainstreamed:
 2005: The Blake Archive approved by MLA‟s CSE
 2006: MLA publishes Electronic Textual Editing
 2006: ACLS report on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences
 2006: NEH Office of Digital Humanities
 2007: NEH DH Start-up grants
 2007: Centernet founded
 2008: CLIR Survey of Digital Humanities Centers
  2012: CLIR “One Culture: Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and
Social Sciences”

In the last decade or so, Digital Humanities seems to have become one of the most highly
funded areas in humanities research and practice. While this has seemingly helped to either
save and/or reinvent some the humanities programmes, a lot of traditional humanists also
view the field and the term with skepticism – as a threat to more traditional forms of
humanities pedagogy and practice. Whether such a context exists in India and is still a matter
of question, and hinges largely on how we understand the digital itself - as an object, concept
or space. For that seems to be where the questions about the field, its emergence, and its
epistemological concerns lie.

References:

 Bell, David. Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Hawaway. New
York: Routledge, 2007.
 Burdick, Anne, et al. Digital_Humanities. Mit Press, 2012.
 Gold, Matthew K., ed. Debates in the digital humanities. U of Minnesota Press, 2012.
 Hockey, Susan. "The history of humanities computing." A companion to digital
humanities (2004)
 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. "What is digital humanities and what‟s it doing in English
departments?." Defining Digital Humanities. Routledge, 2016.
 Oza, Preeti. "Use and Usage: Dealing with Language in the Digital Marketing
World."
 Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds. A companion to digital
humanities. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
 Svensson Patrik, The Landscape of Digital Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly,
2010
 Vanhoutte, Edward, ed. Defining digital humanities: a reader. Ashgate Publishing,
Ltd., 2013.

Web-References:

 https://mkirschenbaum.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/kirschenbaum_ade150.pdf
  https://blogs.brandeis.edu/library/2012/10/09/whats-digital-humanities-and-how-did-
it-get-here/
 http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/index.html
 https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/cdh/what-is-dh

View publication stats