Video now available: Research Without Borders: Defining the Digital Humanities

Another discussion on what constitutes the digital humanities was held at Columbia University on April 6, 2011. 

Questions posed were: 

• What do digital humanities scholars see as the potential of this interdisciplinary field? 
• What are the important theoretical and methodological contributions digital humanities can offer to both the humanities and the sciences?

 Panelists included:

• Daniel J. Cohen, Assoc. Professor of History and Director of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University
• Federica Frabetti, Senior Lecturer in the Communication, Media, and Culture Program at Oxford Brookes University
• Dino Buzzetti from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bologna

Digital Humanities defined (again)

Rafael Alvarado, Asso­ciate Direc­tor of SHANTI at the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia, has written a blog posting titled " The Digital Humanities Situation."  Alvarado argues that there is no definition of DH.  Instead "we have a geneal­ogy, a net­work of fam­ily resem­blances among pro­vi­sional schools of thought, method­olog­i­cal inter­ests, and pre­ferred tools, a his­tory of peo­ple who have cho­sen to call them­selves dig­i­tal human­ists and who in the process of try­ing to define the term are cre­at­ing that def­i­n­i­tion....It is a social cat­e­gory, not an onto­log­i­cal one."

What are the Digital Humanities?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, has written a short essay on the history of  "the Digital Humanities" in The Humanities, Done Digitally, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Digital Campus (May 8, 2011).

Some quotes:

"Just as there are scholars who write about film from perspectives that don't take into account the intellectual history of film studies, and thus are not considered part of the field, there are scholars who work with digital materials but who remain outside the traditions and assumptions of the digital humanities."

 
" The state of things in digital humanities today rests in that creative tension, between those who've been in the field for a long time and those who are coming to it today, between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, between making and interpreting, between the field's history and its future. Scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally. The particular contribution of the digital humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do, as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another."