Digital Humanities Journal #1: What are the Digital Humanities?

- Using an overhead scanner, I looked to digitize letters for references in a research project.

Hi everyone! I know I have been pretty behind on the blog here, but I am happy to share that I will be starting a new series of posts to serve as a home base for discussion and analysis of the Digital Humanities discipline. This stems from a course taught by Dr. David Pettegrew during the Fall of 2023 called Digital Public Humanities. Messiah University provides educational opportunities in such a unique program despite its smaller size. In this blog post, I will be sharing my thoughts on the question, “What are the digital humanities, and what, in your estimation, are their most significant effects on the traditional work of humanists?” using Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto’s book The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars as well as an article published in “History @ Work,” the blog for the National Council on Public History. This article, entitled “History by design: a public historian in the creative field” and written by Laurel Overstreet, describes how a traditional public historian transitioned their methodology and practice into a digital age.

In the opening chapters of A Primer for Students and Scholars, Gardiner and Musto introduce the digital humanities discipline in a plural form, writing, “... we take a nonprescriptive, non-ideological approach to our topic, allowing numerous definitions and approaches and avoiding airtight demarcations by theoretical frame, department, field...” and so on (1). Right away, the authors begin to stray away from what one would think of as a traditional humanistic discipline. Scholars question if the advancement of technology benefits the methodology of historians, writers, and others in the humanities or if it makes them “lazy” for using tools like online search engines. This debate can be expanded further in chapters one and two, where Gardiner and Musto provide an early example of “search-and-sort” methods benefiting the categorization and preservation of valuable material. In a brief account of how IBM founder Thomas J. Watson helped index the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas in 1949, the authors introduce how humanists accomplish a moral goal of sustainable academic infrastructure (2). The authors emphasize the unification of material culture and similar sources in both the digital and academic worlds through the power of technology and digital collections. In Chapter 2, both authors write about how humanists have used locations like the Chartres Cathedral in France or pieces of art like The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli to represent a society's history. They add that original texts play a significant factor in determining how one does research, and through the availability of online collections, we come closer to “completing” the historical record and creating an environment where valuable information can be widely available (3). This creates more opportunities for scholarship where none could have been done before.

Digitization is merely one example where traditional humanists of both the past and the present are affected by an advancement in preservation and technological access. Another catalyst for the conventional work of humanists includes learning how to become a designer and an academic. Through digital humanities practices like graphic design, exhibit creation, and project planning, public historians such as Laurel Overstreet navigate a new form of “problem-solving” (4). Writing for the NCPH blog “History @ Work,” Overstreet describes a series of occasions where grounded historical training became interconnected with design aspects. “Since design is a kind of problem-solving, it helps to be able to understand and articulate the issue you’re addressing...” adding “[a]t the same time, design also requires divergent thinking, or identifying and holding many options, possibilities, and points of view simultaneously” (5). While not a digital humanist by trade but rather a public historian, Overstreet’s thoughts about an exhibit design career connect similarly to the theories and methodologies proposed by Gardiner and Musto. Like historians reading a primary source or viewing an ancient structure to understand the context of a particular person, place, or time, contemporary humanists take up new skills atypical to the narrative of their discipline. The digital humanities allow our past humanists' work to evolve in unexplored ways, bringing greater access and opportunity to a society that is always searching for more information.

Notes:

1. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto, The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) viii, https://archive.org/details/digitalhumanitie0000gard/page/n9/mode/2up.

2. Gardiner and Musto, The Digital Humanities, 3.

3. Gardiner and Musto, 16-17, 19.

4. Overstreet, Laurel, “History by design: a public historian in the creative field,” History @ Work (blog). National Council On Public History. November 25, 2022. https://ncph.org/history-at-work/history-by-design-a-public-historian-in-the-creative-field/.

5. Overstreet, “History by design.”