Enhancing Scholarship through the Digital Humanities

For my class assignment this week, I looked at Dave Parry’s article The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism.  The essay discusses two working definitions of Digital Humanities. The first is that it is a field that is only about using the Internet to create and use tools to do traditional humanities based research.  Many definitions of Digital Humanities that I found online support this definition.  For example, many “What is the Digital Humanities” sections on websites such as UCLA and Stanford claim that digital humanities is unique in that it can be used to exemplify data archiving, social networking, mapping and using photos and videos for the dissemination of knowledge for academic research. In following this definition, the Digital Humanities is used to conduct research efficiently and in a modern way.  Parry in the second definition, claims that the Digital Humanities allows people to use digital technology to transform the very nature of what it means to practice scholarship in the humanities.  In this way, Digital Humanities is not just using computers to look at humanities based texts, but offers a new way to understand traditional humanistic subjects that could not be possible without digital tools.

My digital storytelling video this week shows the first definition of digital humanities and how digital technology alone has not altered the way we use and understand the humanities.  For example, mapping, archiving, and social networks, which is unique to the definition of digital humanities still exists in the traditional humanities (academic books). The ultimate question my video asks is how can the digital humanities be used to enhance scholarship that is already done? If I had longer then 20 minutes in class to do this project, the next step I would take would be to find ways to show how a deeper level of understanding and reflection shows how community building and voice is established through the digital humanities and how that alone is unique to the field. For now though, I think this is an interesting debate to reflect on.