DEFINITIONS

What are the “digital humanities”? Ask a physicist to define gravity, and she will most likely first reply with a brief textual description about forces and masses in the universe and then present a formula. Ask an economist to define poverty, and he might refer you to the U.S. Census Bureau's lists of scales, rates and other metrics. But ask a humanist to define peace, and she will turn first to the dictionary and then to a brief historical survey of how the word evolved, from what languages and therefore from what historical contexts and developments. She might then proceed to construct a narrative based on available written records. She would do these two things because the humanist, unlike the physical or social scientist, deals not with the objects and forces of the natural world or with large abstractions like social groups and economic trends but with language, its origins, constructions, development and perception over time. The very core of humanistic study is to seek out origins and to interpret how we use language – including the language of the visual arts, music and architecture – to understand the world that humans have created. All humanistic study begins and ends with language, its meaning and its ability to bring the past alive.

How then do we understand the digital humanities – a term widely used in administrative, scholarly, library and information technology (IT) circles but rarely defined in any specific way? What exactly do these partners – the digital and the humanities – have to do with one another? Many people look at the marriage and come away with very different impressions, all from their own perspectives. One can analyze the term's exact meanings from several different points of view, conditioned by historical and contemporary thinking and practice.