What are the digital humanities — and what do they do all day?
Photo by Clay Banks via Unsplash
No moment in history has found people across the globe so dependent on digital communication than the coronavirus epidemic. Classrooms, libraries, workplaces, and social discourse have all (mostly) moved online. This particular adaptation of digital life may be new, but as Melih Bilgil explains, every new iteration of digital networks emerged to solve a specific problem, whether military, scientific, commercial or educational (History of the Internet) — and then others adapted those innovations to suit their own needs. The field of digital humanities is no different. Historians, in particular, use computers to digitize physical works and document born-digital works, to analyze those works, and improve access to historical documents for researchers and the public.
Digitizing history serves both qualitative and quantitative purposes. Through historical storytelling resources like Island Histories — a collaborative effort to digitize San Juan Islands history — visitors, residents, and researchers use interactive maps to engage with snippets of island history linked to the places they visit (if only, during travel restrictions, virtually). Historylink.org‘s San Juan Islands page uses a basic website to make detailed and carefully-sourced stories available alongside scanned images and a Google map. “Born-digital” archives like the Internet Archive and its public-facing Wayback Machine record moments in digital time (State of the Field: Digital History). Historians and the public can access these resources from anywhere with an internet connection, encouraging a more robust understanding of both distant and recent history.
Digitizing primary sources turns language, historical societal structures, handwriting, and images, and more into data that can be sorted, enabling historians to conduct quantitative research that would otherwise prove insurmountable. The authors of State of the Field: Digital History argue that “computers do more than present sources as illustrations accompanying a written narrative, but also provide means to analyse these data in new ways.” Optical Character Recognition and Handwriting Text Recognition enable computers to covert images into data, which can then be searched, organized, and analyzed. Born-digital archiving projects like BitCurator enable in-depth research of internet history (State of the Field: Digital History). With historical documents — and powerful quantitative and qualitative research tools available — increasingly available online, understanding history is ever more accessible to historians and the public.
The idea of digitizing humanities research finds itself at odds, at times, with those who work in academics. (Hashtag patriarchy.) On the one hand, resources are more accessible. On the other hand, should historians be required to know how to code? Adam Kirsch writes, “Here is the future, we are made to understand: we can either get on board or stand athwart it and get run over.” What is lost when we abandon traditional forms of recording and learning history? Must a historian also know how to navigate digital tools or else become obsolete? Is there something to be gained from engaging with a physical document that cannot be digitally reproduced? And, the stickiest question: should the public be invited to participate in the conversation? Even researchers allergic to technology benefit from powerful search tools available for most larger archives, which enable them to discover and then visit physical documents that might otherwise lay forgotten — and Kirsch applauds those advances. What he fears is the loss of nuance — that digital humanities function well for “understanding things in the mass” but not for true understanding: “Certainly, if we ask the data unsophisticated or banal questions, we will get only unsophisticated and banal answers” (Technology is Taking Over English Departments: The False Promise of Digital Humanities). Kirsch suggests instead solving the problem of increasing access to physical texts.
While acknowledging similar questions and challenges to Hirsch’s, the authors of State of the Field: Digital History view the move toward digitization as inevitable — and important for both historians and the public: “The increasing availability of digitised sources, either born‐digital or made machine‐readable, affords efficient assessment of sources.” They suggest not a resistance to digitization, but recognizing the tenuous nature of operating in an emerging discipline and adopting an adaptable — though no less intellectually critical — attitude.
The tension lies in a question posed by Kirsch: Are digital humanities their own discipline, or should all humanities scholars be proficient in the digital realm? I believe the latter — to relegate the humanities to paper is exclusionary to public access and limits the power of research historians can do. Kirsch’s vitrol, to me, tastes like the bitter disappointment of someone who expected that becoming an “expert” would mean the end to learning himself. There may have been a moment in history where that was the case, but this is not that moment.
