Blog 1: What is Digital Humanities?
The definition of digital humanities is not one concise definition that is easy to grasp, however it is a concept that is new to society and is constantly changing. The Digital Humanities website that has hundreds of different definitions goes to show how this concept’s definition depends on the person speaking on it. Difference in opinion is what causes people to dive even deeper into digital humanities and explore new areas as well as areas of extreme expertise. The “Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0” brought up how digital humanities is where knowledge that was once on print is now transformed into the digital world. This transformation into the new technological realm allows for the knowledge that was once “closed off” or unable to change to be altered or reworked for a better result. This allows people to learn something new about something they thought was already researched to its limits. Digital humanities can be defined as making information or knowledge multipurpose, which in turns breaks the boundaries of copyrighting. Copyrighting controls the usage of information and digital humanities goes against this because it takes this information and reuses it for the benefit of education. It encourages co-creation and collaboration in areas of expertise because there is always more information to be found. With technology and information combined into one, there is no limit to the extent knowledge can be interpreted. The creation of digital technology opened a world with no boundaries where information is at everyone’s fingertips. As mentioned in the Manifesto, Google and Wikipedia are a few of the platforms that have come from digital humanities. Wikipedia is unique as it allows everyone to post their knowledge and show “multilingual authorship”. The textbook also relays how digital humanities creates a platform for projects as it provides the materials needed, the statistical analysis needed, and the presentation needed to properly present this analyzed information. These texts gave me a good sense of what digital humanities could be defined as and have showed me how broad of a topic this can be as so much can be included in it.
I would consider the National Archives website an example of DH as it transformed these important paper documents into the digital world to be analyzed.
The archives are a great example of disseminating information to a broader audience. Not every project or area of DH would be against copyright, but the spirit is to make information and scholarly methods more widely available!
ReplyDeleteI liked how you pointed out that DH is constantly changing. I think it is a weird yet incredible phenomenon that we are actively and constantly making new discoveries and learning new information that contributes to the expansion and change of not only society but DH as well.
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