What is Digital Humanities?
Digital Humanities is the critical study of the intersection between digital technologies, disciplines in the Arts and Humanities, and scholarly communication.
The University of Reading sees Digital Humanities as a discipline in its own right. As such, work that engages with Digital Humanities is inherently interdisciplinary.
Engaging with DH
There are two main ways in which you might engage with Digital Humanities methods and principles in your research:
- Using digital tools and software in interpreting and addressing Arts and Humanities research questions, including in the collection, manipulation, or visualisation of Arts and Humanities research data
- Applying critical traditions in Arts and Humanities research to digital technologies, including assessing the impact on research outcomes of using such technologies in research
Why DH?
Digital Humanities combines humanities approaches and subjects with digital and technological ones, in order to enhance knowledge and understanding of both. This can involve answering existing research questions in new ways, or developing entirely new research questions. For example:
Digital technologies can enable humanities researchers to analyse information differently and to look at more information than they otherwise would. For example, a DH project might combine qualitative analysis of a few texts or objects with quantitative analysis of hundreds of thousands of such objects.
Humanities researchers might also use digital methods, such as data modelling and data visualisation, as part of their argumentation. For example, a DH project might use a network diagram to develop and test a theory about the relationships between people and institutions in a society.
Humanities questions pose interesting challenges to researchers in other disciplines (e.g. computer science), since humanities data is frequently ambiguous, has gaps etc.
Humanities researchers might also critically assess digital technologies from a social and cultural perspective. For example, a DH project might explore bias in the machine generation of images, or examine passages of code as texts.
Just as digital technologies can change how we do humanities research, humanities research can impact how such technologies are developed, used and understood.
Principles of DH Research
DH as a discipline draws on expertise in many different sectors. Accordingly, DH projects are often collaborative. They may involve researchers in the arts and humanities, computer scientists and information scientists, GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) professionals, and creative practitioners. (This is not an exhaustive list.)
The coming together of different disciplines and approaches presents opportunities to critique and improve the ways in which we conduct and communicate research. Thus, DH as a field is particularly engaged in areas such as:
- Accessibility and inclusivity
- Sustainability (including environmental sustainability)
- Reproducibility of data and open access
- Transparency and documentation practices
- Research ethics
- Infrastructure and equity
What’s next?
We in the DH Hub and DH Community of Practice encourage and support projects which use digital technologies in original and critical ways, to inform their research questions, methods and outcomes. We can help you to develop such research projects, in which DH methods and principles are fully integrated. You can find our contact details here.
For inspiration, and to help you think about how you could use DH in your own project, you can explore examples of current University of Reading DH projects on our Case Studies page, and further examples of DH projects on our Links page. You might also like to explore our other DH Guides.
Even if you do not use digital methods in your own research, we invite you to think of Digital Humanities as a vehicle by which to ask not only new and innovative questions about your discipline but also the oldest and most fundamental ones, at this time when the landscape of research is changing. Who gets to tell stories? What gets digitised – in other words, which sources are made available? Who hears the stories of people with no resources to fund making them available? These are all questions that we, as researchers, owe it to future generations of students and colleagues to take seriously.
This guide was edited by Dawn Kanter, Digital Humanities Officer. It combines information from our ‘What is Digital Humanities?’ page and two earlier resources: ‘Is Digital Humanities for Me?’, written by Claire Collins, Senior Library Assistant (Research Engagement), and ‘Starting out with a DH Project’.