Digital Humanities

 Digital Humanities:-

Digital humanities is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the reflection on their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.The digital humanities at Stanford sit at the crossroads of computer science and the humanities. Since the 1980’s, a wide range of computational tools have enabled humanities scholars to conduct research at a scale once thought impossible. Digital humanities foster collaboration and traverse disciplines and methodological orientations, with projects to digitize archival materials for posterity, to map the exchange and transmission of ideas in history, and to study the evolution of common words over the centuries.

At Stanford, current digital humanities projects implement tools such as 3-D mapping, algorithmic literary analysis, advanced visualization techniques, and digitization of textual corpora in non-Latin languages. Researchers experiment and interact with source materials in ways that yield new findings, while also building community and sharing information. Stanford scholars harness new technologies through an array of digital humanities initiatives

The use of information technology to illuminate the human record, and the process of bringing the critical tools of human understanding to bear on information technology. While the scope of Digital Humanity is so daunting it may be paralyzing, the goal is to understand and promote humanity, which in our experience, is amazingly doable. While Digital Humanity provides us with a framework to do science there is no guarantee the tech community will be willing to adapt this model and if so, to assure the models continue to optimize for human growth, rather than say human manipulability.We’re bringing social and data sciences together to bridge the gap between traditional and digital humanity. The only people capable of leading this human-centric movement are those who design and develop these learning systems.  That developers work together to formalize a statement of goals for Digital Humanity.  A meeting in support of Digital Humanity be held in one year. The primary agenda item is to assure the development of Digital Humanity.

In The Big Humanities: Digital Humanities/Digital Laboratories, Richard J. Lane discusses a number of types of “humanistic labs, centres, projects, and products,” but he maintains a striking focus on the possibilities of the digital humanities (DH) lab. For Lane, the digital humanities lab provides an opportunity to bring a Big Science research model to the humanities, which includes a shift to “lab-based” knowledge production [Lane 2017]. Everything is larger: the research teams, the data sets, the duration of projects, the funding — evolution, so to speak, of what we might call a “lab ethos” [Lane 2017]. In addition, the construction of Big Humanities as a topic area correlates closely with a shift in philanthropy in higher education, which is “less concerned about creating in-perpetuity funds than solving a large, intractable problem” [Thorp 2010, 145]. DH funders such as the Mellon Foundation will fund projects for impact, which is viewed as highly interdisciplinary, with high levels of engagement, and market-consciousness [Thorp 2010]. The more scientific the model and technical the discourse, the more likely STEM funding may also be available [Thornham 2017]. For this reason, Big Humanities are in great demand, and labs compete for large-scale funding through the constructive and imagineering nature of their grants. Inevitably, the paradigm of funding shapes the kind of work that is done, and the tools and methods that are used.

we consider what invisible or less visible work becomes illuminated when practitioners understand the DH lab as a space for prioritizing graduate student needs. Graduate student perspectives may be sufficiently overlooked in the debates of “what,” “why,” and “who” is the digital humanities, despite the importance of graduate students to most DH teams reliant upon their labor.

Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which: a) print is no 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 b) digital tools, techniques, and media have altered the production and dissemination of knowledge in the arts, human and social sciences. The Digital Humanities seeks to play an inaugural role with respect to a world in which, no longer the sole producers, stewards, and disseminators of knowledge or culture, universities are called upon to shape natively digital models of scholarly discourse for the newly emergent public spheres of the present era (the www, the blogosphere, digital libraries, etc.), to model excellence and innovation in these domains, and to facilitate the formation of networks of knowledge production, exchange, and dissemination that are, at once, global and local.

Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital revolution looked backward as it moved forward. Just as early codices mirrored oratorical practices, print initially mirrored the practices of high medieval manuscript culture, and film mirrored the techniques of theater, the digital first wave replicated the world of scholarly communications that print gradually codified over the course of five centuries: a world where textuality was primary and visuality and sound were secondary (and subordinated to text), even as it vastly accelerated the search and retrieval of documents, enhanced access, and altered mental habits. Now it must shape a future in which the medium‐specific features of digital technologies become its core and in which print is absorbed into new hybrid modes of communication.

The first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character. It harnesses digital toolkits in the service of the Humanities’ core methodological strengths: attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation. Such a crudely drawn dichotomy does not exclude the emotional, even sublime potentiality of the quantitative any more than it excludes embeddings of quantitative analysis within qualitative frameworks. Rather it imagines new couplings and scalings that are facilitated both by new models of research practice and by the availability of new tools and technologies.