Digital Humanities @ Duke University Libraries

Although the term “digital humanities” has been floating around for over a decade, a precise definition is difficult to pin down. In fact, debates over how to describe the field and mark its borders predate the label itself. Still some sort of definition is needed to move forward, so many DH-related books and journals settle on working definitions while acknowledging that a static definition can’t fully explain the nuances of an evolving field of study. Here are excerpts from several working definitions of DH that serve to illustrate the diverse and dynamic nature of the field:

• “At its core digital humanities is more akin to a common methodological outlook than an investment in any one specific set of texts or even technologies…. Yet digital humanities is also a social undertaking. It harbors networks of people who have been working together, sharing research, arguing, competing, and collaborating for many years.... a culture that values collaboration, openness, nonhierarchical relations, and agility” - Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his 2010 article “What Is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?”

• “The phrase Digital Humanities… describes not just a collective singular but also the humanities in the plural, able to address and engage disparate subject matters across media, language, location, and history. But, however heterogeneous, the Digital Humanities is unified by its emphasis on making, connecting, interpreting, and collaborating” - Digital-Humanities by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp, 2012.

• “DH values collaboration, plurality, investigation of human culture, and the disruption of and reflection on traditional practices and is concerned with not just the use of digital technology for humanities projects but how the use of digital technology for humanities projects changes the user’s experience.” - THATCamp LAC 2012.

This list of milestones in the development of the Digital Humanities comes from John Unsworth's 2012 blog post What’s “digital humanities” and how did it get here?

 

1949-1970: DH in Computing Centers

1949: Father Roberto Busa began his index of every word in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (11M words); visits Thomas Watson and enlists IBM

1963: Roy Wisbey founded the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing in Cambridge to support his work with Early Middle High German Texts.

1966: Computers and the Humanities (now Language Resources and Evaluation) founded; Wilhelm Ott (developer of TUSTEP) learns to program

1970: The first instance of what later became the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing conference is held at the University of Cambridge.

1973-1992: DH and Scholarly Societies

1973: Founding of  The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing

1978:  Founding of the  Association for Computers and The Humanities

1985: Perseus Project begun at Harvard

1986: Literary and Linguistic Computing (now Digital Scholarship in the Humanities) founded

1986: SGML Standard Generalized Markup Language specification released

1987: Text-Encoding Initiative, Humanist begun

1989: First joint ACH/ALLC conference held in Toronto (at which Bob Kraft demonstrates Ibycus, TLG, hypertext)

1991: Electronic Beowulf Project

1992: H-Net founded

1992-2004: DH and Libraries

2005: The Blake Archive approved by MLA’s CSE

2006: MLA publishes Electronic Textual Editing

2006: ACLS report on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences

2006: NEH Office of Digital Humanities

2007: NEH DH Start-up grants

2007: Centernet founded

2008: CLIR Survey of Digital Humanities Centers

2012: CLIR “One Culture: Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences”

Highlight:

Digital Humanities Bibliography at the Duke’s Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab

In February 2019, John Taormina launched the Digital Humanities Bibliography with assistance from Alexander Strecker, Katherine McCusker, and Michael O’Sullivan.

Search for more:

Search for a variety of books on issues and trends in Digital Humanities in the Duke Catalog, Search TRLN (Duke, UNC, NCCU, NCSU), and at Worldcat ( a union catalog of academic libraries), using the search term suggestions on the Resources page in this guide. 

Other bibliographies

• Digital Humanities Bibliographies by Laura Mandell

• Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Keeping up with Digital Humanities

• DH + Lib Readings

• Doing Digital Humanities DARIAH

• Getting Started with Data, Tools and Platforms