Open Access Books
What are the Digital Humanities?
What Are the Digital Humanities?
The digital humanities are an emerging area of scholarly research that applies computional approaches to questions and topics in the humanities. As a developing field, you'll find lots of different definitions. Digital humanists come from a range of fields such as art history, classics, English, foreign languages, history, religious studies, and theology. The kinds of projects digital humanists work on also vary widely. Students in the English department, for example, may collaborate on encoding a literary corpus. Art historians may use image recognition toolkits to classify works of art in novel ways. Historians may analyze the social networks of nineteenth century politicians. The boundaries of the digital humanities are fluid and interesting new applications appear almost daily.
How Can I Get Started?
The Digital Scholarship and Communication (DISC) team in the University Library can help you get started on a digital humanities project. If you're thinking about starting a new project, please contact us to make an appointment. We have specialists in various areas of the digital humanities, including digital text encoding, GIS services, open access licensing, and network analysis. We'd be delighted to help you envision your project and provide advice about how to get going.
You should also connect with the other centers of digital humanities activities on campus, including the Center for Digital Humanities, Curb Center for Arts, Enterprise and Public Policy, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, and the Center for Second Language Studies, among others.
