Digital Humanities

Abstract

The article offers a definition, overview, and assessment of the current state of digital humanities, particularly with regard to its actual and potential contribution to literary studies. It outlines the history of humanities computing and digital humanities, its evolution as a discipline, including its institutional development and outstanding challenges it faces. It also considers some of the most cogent critiques digital humanities has faced, particularly from North American-based literary scholars, some of whom have suggested it represents a threat to centuries-old traditions of humanistic inquiry and particularly to literary scholarship based on the tradition of close reading. The article shows instead that digital humanities approaches gainfully employed offer powerful new means of illuminating both context and content of texts, to assist with both close and distant readings, offering a supplement rather than a replacement for traditional means of literary inquiry. The digital techniques it discusses include stylometry, topic modeling, literary mapping, historical bibliometrics, corpus linguistic techniques, and sequence alignment, as well as some of the contributions that they have made. Further, the article explains how many key aspirations of digital humanities scholarship, including interoperability and linked open data, have yet to be realized, and it considers some of the projects that are currently making this possible and the challenges that they face. The article concludes on a slightly cautionary note: What are the implications of the digital humanities for literary study? It is too early to tell.

Education and Social Science

“…None of this will be easy, however, because coding the content of a curriculum, or coding how students have responded to that, is very much more difficult than even the undoubtedly challenging tasks of analysing online social media or analysing interviews. So this work would also have to draw on the development of digital humanities, which in several respects dates from as far back as the 1960s, and yet has never, so far as I know, impinged on the systematic study of curricula and their reception (Burrows & Falk, 2020). But, difficult though this may be, we have to do it.…”

CH-Bench: a user-oriented benchmark for systems for efficient distant reading (design, performance, and insights)

“…Applying computational techniques to traditional humanities problems is called digital humanities [5]. This includes using data analysis methods in various humanistic disciplines.…”

Literature Survey and Analysis of Digital Humanities and Libraries in Recent Years

“…Burrows, S. & Falk, M. 25 stated a classification, an overview, and an evaluation of the current state of "Digital Humanities (DH)," Particularly in terms of its actual and potential relevance to literary studies. The study examined the most persuasive criticisms leveled against digital humanities, specifically from North American literary scholars, and provided a historical overview of humanities computing and digital humanities, including its development as a field, institutional growth, and the unresolved trials that it faces.…”