Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...
or
digital technologies and the disciplines of the
humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the t ...
. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application.
DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing.
It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.
By producing and using new applications and techniques, DH makes new kinds of teaching possible, while at the same time studying and critiquing how these impact cultural heritage and digital culture.
DH is also applied in research. Thus, a distinctive feature of DH is its cultivation of a two-way relationship between the humanities and the digital: the field both employs technology in the pursuit of humanities research and subjects technology to humanistic questioning and interrogation, often simultaneously.
Definition
The definition of the digital humanities is being continually formulated by scholars and practitioners. Since the field is constantly growing and changing, specific definitions can quickly become outdated or unnecessarily limit future potential. The second volume of ''Debates in the Digital Humanities'' (2016) acknowledges the difficulty in defining the field: "Along with the digital archives, quantitative analyses, and tool-building projects that once characterized the field, DH now encompasses a wide range of methods and practices: visualizations of large image sets, 3D modeling of historical artifacts, 'born digital' dissertations,
hashtag activism
Hashtag activism refers to the use of Twitter's hashtags for Internet activism. The hashtag, has become one of the many ways that social media contributes to civic engagement and social movements. The use of the hashtag on social media provides us ...
and the analysis thereof,
alternate reality game
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.
The form is defined by inten ...
s, mobile makerspaces, and more. In what has been called 'big tent' DH, it can at times be difficult to determine with any specificity what, precisely, digital humanities work entails."
Historically, the digital humanities developed out of humanities computing and has become associated with other fields, such as humanistic computing, social computing, and media studies. In concrete terms, the digital humanities embraces a variety of topics, from curating online collections of primary sources (primarily textual) to the
data mining of large cultural data sets to
topic modeling
In statistics and natural language processing, a topic model is a type of statistical model for discovering the abstract "topics" that occur in a collection of documents. Topic modeling is a frequently used text-mining tool for discovery of hidden ...
. Digital humanities incorporates both digitized (remediated) and
born-digital
The term born-digital refers to materials that originate in a digital form.NDIIPP"Preserving Digital Culture,"Library of Congress. This is in contrast to digital reformatting, through which analog materials become digital, as in the case of fil ...
materials and combines the methodologies from traditional humanities disciplines (such as
rhetoric,
history
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...
,
philosophy,
linguistics
Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
,
literature
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...
,
art
Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...
,
archaeology
Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landsca ...
,
music
Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspe ...
, and
cultural studies) and social sciences,
with tools provided by
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...
(such as
hypertext,
hypermedia,
data visualisation
Data and information visualization (data viz or info viz) is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the graphic representation of data and information. It is a particularly efficient way of communicating when the data or information is nu ...
,
information retrieval, data mining,
statistics,
text mining
Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...
,
digital mapping
Digital mapping (also called digital or computer cartography) is the process by which a collection of spatial data is compiled and formatted into a virtual image on a computer. The primary function of this technology is to produce maps that give a ...
), and
digital publishing
Electronic publishing (also referred to as publishing, digital publishing, or online publishing) includes the digital publication of e-books, digital magazines, and the development of digital libraries and catalogues. It also includes the editi ...
. Related subfields of digital humanities have emerged like
software studies
Software studies is an emerging interdisciplinary research field, which studies software systems and their social and cultural effects. The implementation and use of software has been studied in recent fields such as cyberculture, Internet stu ...
, platform studies, and
critical code studies
Critical code studies (CCS) is an emerging academic subfield, related to software studies, digital humanities, cultural studies, computer science, human–computer interface, and the do-it-yourself maker culture. Its primary focus is on the cult ...
. Fields that parallel the digital humanities include
new media studies
New media studies is an academic discipline that explores the intersections of computing, science, the humanities, and the visual and performing arts. Janet Murray, a prominent researcher in the discipline, describes this intersection as "a singl ...
and
information science
Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of informatio ...
as well as
media theory of composition Commonly called new media theory or media-centered theory of composition, stems from the rise of computers as word processing tools. Media theorists now also examine the rhetorical strengths and weakness of different media, and the implications thes ...
,
game studies
Game studies, also known as ludology (from ''ludus'', "game", and ''-logia'', "study", "research"), is the study of games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures surrounding them. It is a field of cultural studies that deals with a ...
, particularly in areas related to digital humanities project design and production, and
cultural analytics. Each disciplinary field and each country has its own unique history of digital humanities.
Berry and Fagerjord have suggested that a way to reconceptualise digital humanities could be through a "digital humanities stack". They argue that "this type of diagram is common in computation and computer science to show how technologies are 'stacked' on top of each other in increasing levels of abstraction. Here,
hey
Hey or Hey! may refer to:
Music
* Hey (band), a Polish rock band
Albums
* ''Hey'' (Andreas Bourani album) or the title song (see below), 2014
* ''Hey!'' (Julio Iglesias album) or the title song, 1980
* ''Hey!'' (Jullie album) or the title s ...
use the method in a more illustrative and creative sense of showing the range of activities, practices, skills, technologies and structures that could be said to make up the digital humanities, with the aim of providing a high-level map." Indeed, the "diagram can be read as the bottom levels indicating some of the fundamental elements of the digital humanities stack, such as computational thinking and knowledge representation, and then other elements that later build on these. "
In practical terms, a major distinction within digital humanities is the focus on the data being processed. For processing textual data, digital humanities builds on a long and extensive history of
digital edition
A digital edition is an online magazine or online newspaper delivered in electronic form which is formatted identically to the print version. Digital editions are often called digital facsimiles to underline the likeness to the print version. Digi ...
,
computational linguistics and
natural language processing and developed an independent and highly specialized technology stack (largely cumulating in the specifications of the
Text Encoding Initiative
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities, operating continuously since the 1980s. The community currently runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and main ...
). This part of the field is sometimes thus set apart from Digital Humanities in general as 'digital philology' or 'computational philology'. For the creation and analysis of digital editions of objects or artifacts, digital philologists have access to digital practices, methods, and technologies such as
optical character recognition
Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a sc ...
that are providing opportunities to adapt the field to the digital age.
History
Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, whose origins reach back to 1940s and 50s, in the pioneering work of Jesuit scholar
Roberto Busa
Roberto Busa (November 28, 1913 – August 9, 2011) was an Italian Jesuit priest and one of the pioneers in the usage of computers for linguistic and literary analysis. He was the author of the ''Index Thomisticus'', a complete lemmatization of t ...
, which began in 1946, and of English professor
Josephine Miles
Josephine Louise Miles (June 11, 1911 – May 12, 1985) was an American poet and literary critic; the first woman tenured in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley. She wrote over a dozen books of poetry and several wor ...
, beginning in the early 1950s.
In collaboration with
IBM, Busa and his team created a computer-generated concordance to
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, OP (; it, Tommaso d'Aquino, lit=Thomas of Aquino; 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Dominican friar and priest who was an influential philosopher, theologian and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism; he is known wit ...
' writings known as the ''
Index Thomisticus
The ''Index Thomisticus'' was a digital humanities project begun in the 1940s that created a concordance to 179 texts centering around Thomas Aquinas. Led by Roberto Busa, the project indexed 10,631,980 words over the course of 34 years, initia ...
''.
Busa's works have been collected and translated by
Julianne Nyhan and Marco Passarotti. Other scholars began using mainframe computers to automate tasks like word-searching, sorting, and counting, which was much faster than processing information from texts with handwritten or typed index cards.
Similar first advances were made by Gerhard Sperl in
Austria
Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...
using computers by
Zuse
Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-c ...
for Digital
Assyriology.
In the decades which followed archaeologists, classicists, historians, literary scholars, and a broad array of humanities researchers in other disciplines applied emerging computational methods to transform humanities scholarship.
As Tara McPherson has pointed out, the digital humanities also inherit practices and perspectives developed through many artistic and theoretical engagements with electronic screen culture beginning the late 1960s and 1970s. These range from research developed by organizations such as
SIGGRAPH to creations by artists such as
Charles and Ray Eames
Charles Eames ( Charles Eames, Jr) and Ray Eames ( Ray-Bernice Eames) were an American married couple of industrial designers who made significant historical contributions to the development of modern architecture and furniture through the work of ...
and the members of
E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology). The Eames and E.A.T. explored nascent computer culture and intermediality in creative works that dovetailed technological innovation with art.
The first specialized journal in the digital humanities was ''Computers and the Humanities'', which debuted in 1966. The
Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) association was founded in 1973. The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) were then founded in 1977 and 1978, respectively.
Soon, there was a need for a standardized protocol for tagging digital texts, and the
Text Encoding Initiative
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities, operating continuously since the 1980s. The community currently runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and main ...
(TEI) was developed.
The TEI project was launched in 1987 and published the first full version of the ''TEI Guidelines'' in May 1994.
TEI helped shape the field of electronic textual scholarship and led to
Extensible Markup Language
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...
(XML), which is a tag scheme for digital editing. Researchers also began experimenting with databases and hypertextual editing, which are structured around links and nodes, as opposed to the standard linear convention of print.
In the nineties, major digital text and image archives emerged at centers of humanities computing in the U.S. (e.g. the ''
Women Writers Project The Northeastern University Women Writers Project (formerly the Brown University Women Writers Project) or WWP, founded in 1986 at Brown University, is a long-term research and publication project which focuses on making texts from early modern wom ...
'', the ''Rossetti Archive'', and ''
The William Blake Archive
The William Blake Archive is a digital humanities project started in 1994, a first version of the website was launched in 1996.{{cite journal, last1=Crawford, first1=Kendal, last2=Levy, first2=Michelle, journal=RIDE: A Review Journal for Digital E ...
''), which demonstrated the sophistication and robustness of text-encoding for literature. The advent of personal computing and the World Wide Web meant that Digital Humanities work could become less centered on text and more on design. The multimedia nature of the internet has allowed Digital Humanities work to incorporate audio, video, and other components in addition to text.
The terminological change from "humanities computing" to "digital humanities" has been attributed to
John Unsworth John Unsworth is the university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Virginia, a position he has held since June 25, 2016.
Biography
John Unsworth was born in 1958, in Northampton, Massachusetts. He graduated from Northampton High ...
, Susan Schreibman, and Ray Siemens who, as editors of the anthology ''A Companion to Digital Humanities'' (2004), tried to prevent the field from being viewed as "mere digitization".
Consequently, the hybrid term has created an overlap between fields like rhetoric and composition, which use "the methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects",
and digital humanities, which uses "digital technology in studying traditional humanities objects".
The use of computational systems and the study of computational media within the
humanities, arts and social sciences
Humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS) is a broad term used to group together the academic disciplines of humanities, arts and social sciences. It is used as an academic counterpart to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the ...
more generally has been termed the 'computational turn'.
In 2006 the
National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...
(NEH) launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (renamed Office of Digital Humanities in 2008), which made widespread adoption of the term "digital humanities" in the United States.
Digital humanities emerged from its former niche status and became "big news"
at the 2009
MLA convention in Philadelphia, where digital humanists made "some of the liveliest and most visible contributions" and had their field hailed as "the first 'next big thing' in a long time."
In November 2018, the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum was about the theme: “Management. The human dimension”. Among the articles presented the one that left its mark in the field of digital humanities was:
Values and methods
Although digital humanities projects and initiatives are diverse, they often reflect common values and methods.
These can help in understanding this hard-to-define field.
Values
* Critical and theoretical
* Iterative and experimental
* Collaborative and distributed
* Multimodal and performative
* Open and accessible
Methods
* Enhanced critical curation
* Augmented editions and fluid textuality
* Scale: the law of large numbers
* Distant/close, macro/micro, surface/depth
* Cultural analytics, aggregation, and data-mining
* Visualization and data design
* Locative investigation and thick mapping
* The animated archive
* Distributed knowledge production and performative access
* Humanities gaming
* Code, software, and platform studies
* Database documentaries
* Repurposable content and remix culture
* Pervasive infrastructure
* Ubiquitous scholarship
In keeping with the value of being open and accessible, many digital humanities projects and journals are
open access and/or under
Creative Commons licensing, showing the field's "commitment to
open standards
An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definitio ...
and
open source." Open access is designed to enable anyone with an internet-enabled device and internet connection to view a website or read an article without having to pay, as well as share content with the appropriate permissions.
Digital humanities scholars use computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms, generating new questions and pioneering new approaches. One goal is to systematically integrate computer technology into the activities of humanities scholars,
as is done in contemporary empirical
social sciences
Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of so ...
. Yet despite the significant trend in digital humanities towards networked and multimodal forms of knowledge, a substantial amount of digital humanities focuses on documents and text in ways that differentiate the field's work from digital research in
media studies,
information studies
Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of information. P ...
,
communication studies, and
sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...
. Another goal of digital humanities is to create scholarship that transcends textual sources. This includes the integration of
multimedia
Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...
,
metadata, and dynamic environments (see
The Valley of the Shadow
The Valley of the Shadow is a digital history project about the American Civil War, launched in 1993 and hosted by the University of Virginia. It details the experiences of Confederate soldiers from Augusta County, Virginia and Union soldiers f ...
project at the
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with highly selective ad ...
, the
Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular at
University of Southern California
, mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it"
, religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist
, established =
, accreditation = WSCUC
, type = Private research university
, academic_affiliations =
, endowment = $8.1 ...
, or Digital Pioneers projects at Harvard). A growing number of researchers in digital humanities are using computational methods for the analysis of large cultural data sets such as the
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical ...
corpus.
[Roth, S. (2014), "Fashionable functions. A Google n-gram view of trends in functional differentiation (1800-2000)", ''International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction'', Band 10, Nr. 2, S. 34-58 (online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2491422).] Examples of such projects were highlighted by the Humanities High Performance Computing competition sponsored by the Office of Digital Humanities in 2008, and also by the Digging Into Data challenge organized in 2009 and 2011 by NEH in collaboration with NSF,
and in partnership with
JISC
Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit company that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education institutions and research as well as not-for-profits and the public sector.
History
T ...
in the UK, and
SSHRC
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC; french: Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada, CRSH) is a Canadian federal research-funding agency that promotes and supports post-secondary research and traini ...
in Canada. In addition to books, historical newspapers can also be analyzed with big data methods. The analysis of vast quantities of historical newspaper content has showed how periodic structures can be automatically discovered, and a similar analysis was performed on social media. As part of the big data revolution,
gender bias
Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls.There is a clear and broad consensus among academic scholars in multiple fields that sexism refers primari ...
,
readability, content similarity, reader preferences, and even mood have been analyzed based on
text mining
Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...
methods over millions of documents
and historical documents written in literary Chinese.
[Bol, P. K., C.-L. Liu, and H. Wang. (2015) "Mining and discovering biographical information in Difangzhi with a language-model-based approach", ''Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Digital Humanities''. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.02148)]
Digital humanities is also involved in the creation of software, providing "environments and tools for producing, curating, and interacting with knowledge that is 'born digital' and lives in various digital contexts." In this context, the field is sometimes known as computational humanities.
Tools
Digital humanities scholars use a variety of digital tools for their research, which may take place in an environment as small as a mobile device or as large as a
virtual reality
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), e ...
lab. Environments for "creating, publishing and working with digital scholarship include everything from personal equipment to institutes and software to cyberspace." Some scholars use advanced programming languages and databases, while others use less complex tools, depending on their needs. DiRT (Digital Research Tools Directory) offers a registry of digital research tools for scholars. TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) is a gateway to text analysis and retrieval tools. An accessible, free example of an online textual analysis program is
Voyant Tools, which only requires the user to copy and paste either a body of text or a URL and then click the 'reveal' button to run the program. There is also an online list of online or downloadable Digital Humanities tools that are largely free, aimed toward helping students and others who lack access to funding or institutional servers. Free, open source web publishing platforms like
WordPress
WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...
and
Omeka
Omeka (also known as Omeka Classic) is a free, open-source content management system for online digital collections. As a web application, it allows users to publish and exhibit cultural heritage objects, and extend its functionality with the ...
are also popular tools.
Projects
Digital humanities projects are more likely than traditional humanities work to involve a team or a lab, which may be composed of faculty, staff, graduate or undergraduate students, information technology specialists, and partners in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Credit and authorship are often given to multiple people to reflect this collaborative nature, which is different from the sole authorship model in the traditional humanities (and more like the natural sciences).
There are thousands of digital humanities projects, ranging from small-scale ones with limited or no funding to large-scale ones with multi-year financial support. Some are continually updated while others may not be due to loss of support or interest, though they may still remain online in either a
beta version
A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...
or a finished form. The following are a few examples of the variety of projects in the field:
Digital archives
The
Women Writers Project The Northeastern University Women Writers Project (formerly the Brown University Women Writers Project) or WWP, founded in 1986 at Brown University, is a long-term research and publication project which focuses on making texts from early modern wom ...
(begun in 1988) is a long-term research project to make pre-Victorian women writers more accessible through an electronic collection of rare texts. The Walt Whitman Archive (begun in the 1990s) sought to create a hypertext and scholarly edition of
Whitman's works and now includes photographs, sounds, and the only comprehensive current bibliography of Whitman criticism. The Emily Dickinson Archive (begun in 2013) is a collection of high-resolution images of
Dickinson's poetry manuscripts as well as a searchable lexicon of over 9,000 words that appear in the poems.
The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University, preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. This Digital Archive currently holds 500,000 unique images, dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries, and documents the history of between 6 and 8 million individuals. They are the most extensive serial records for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World and also include valuable information on the indigenous, European, and Asian populations who lived alongside them.
The involvement of librarians and archivists plays an important part in digital humanities projects because of the recent expansion of their role so that it now covers
digital curation Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets.
Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished ...
, which is critical in the preservation, promotion, and access to digital collections, as well as the application of scholarly orientation to digital humanities projects. A specific example involves the case of initiatives where archivists help scholars and academics build their projects through their experience in evaluating, implementing, and customizing metadata schemas for library collections.
The initiatives at the
National Autonomous University of Mexico is another example of a digital humanities project. These include the digitization of 17th-century manuscripts, an electronic corpus of Mexican history from the 16th to 19th century, and the visualization of pre-Hispanic archaeological sites in
3-D.
Cultural analytics
"Cultural analytics" refers to the use of computational method for exploration and analysis of large visual collections and also contemporary digital media. The concept was developed in 2005 by
Lev Manovich
Lev Manovich ( ) is an author of books on digital culture and new media, and professor of Computer Science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Manovich's current research and teaching focuses on digital humanities, social computin ...
who then established the Cultural Analytics Lab in 2007 at Qualcomm Institute at California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2). The lab has been using methods from the field of computer science called Computer Vision many types of both historical and contemporary visual media—for example, all covers of ''Time'' magazine published between 1923 and 2009, 20,000 historical art photographs from the collection in Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, one million pages from Manga books, and 16 million images shared on Instagram in 17 global cities. Cultural analytics also includes using methods from media design and data visualization to create interactive visual interfaces for exploration of large visual collections e.g., Selfiecity and On Broadway.
Cultural analytics research is also addressing a number of theoretical questions. How can we "observe" giant cultural universes of both user-generated and professional media content created today, without reducing them to averages, outliers, or pre-existing categories? How can work with large cultural data help us question our stereotypes and assumptions about cultures? What new theoretical cultural concepts and models are required for studying global digital culture with its new mega-scale, speed, and connectivity?
The term "cultural analytics" (or "culture analytics") is now used by many other researchers, as exemplified by two academic symposiums, a four-month long research program at UCLA that brought together 120 leading researchers from university and industry labs, an academic peer-review ''Journal of Cultural Analytics: CA'' established in 2016, and academic job listings.
Textual mining, analysis, and visualization
WordHoard (begun in 2004) is a free application that enables scholarly but non-technical users to read and analyze, in new ways, deeply-tagged texts, including the canon of Early Greek epic,
Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for '' The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He w ...
,
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...
, and
Spenser. The Republic of Letters (begun in 2008) seeks to visualize the social network of Enlightenment writers through an interactive map and visualization tools. Network analysis and data visualization is also used for reflections on the field itself – researchers may produce network maps of social media interactions or infographics from data on digital humanities scholars and projects.
Document in Context of its Time (DICT) analysis style and an onlin
demo toolallow in an interactive way let users know whether the vocabulary used by an author of an input text was frequent at the time of text creation, whether the author used anachronisms or neologisms, and enables detecting terms in text that underwent considerable semantic change.
Analysis of macroscopic trends in cultural change
Culturomics is a form of
computational lexicology
Computational lexicology is a branch of computational linguistics, which is concerned with the use of computers in the study of lexicon. It has been more narrowly described by some scholars (Amsler, 1980) as the use of computers in the study of '' ...
that studies
human behavior
Human behavior is the potential and expressed capacity ( mentally, physically, and socially) of human individuals or groups to respond to internal and external stimuli throughout their life. Kagan, Jerome, Marc H. Bornstein, and Richard M. ...
and
cultural trends
The bandwagon effect is the tendency for people to adopt certain behaviors, styles, or attitudes simply because others are doing so. More specifically, it is a cognitive bias by which public opinion or behaviours can alter due to particular acti ...
through the
quantitative analysis of digitized texts. Researchers
data mine large
digital archive
An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located.
Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...
s to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage. The term is an American
neologism
A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
first described in a 2010 ''
Science (journal), Science'' article called ''Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books'', co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and
Erez Lieberman Aiden
Erez Lieberman Aiden (born 1980, né Erez Lieberman) is an American research scientist active in multiple fields related to applied mathematics. He is an assistant professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, and formerly a fellow at the Harvar ...
.
A 2017 study
published in the
compared the trajectory of n-grams over time in both digitised books from the 2010
Science (journal), Science article
with those found in a large corpus of regional newspapers from the United Kingdom over the course of 150 years. The study further went on to use more advanced
natural language processing techniques to discover macroscopic trends in history and culture, including gender bias, geographical focus, technology, and politics, along with accurate dates for specific events.
The applications of digital humanities may be used along with other non humanities subject areas such as pure sciences, agriculture, management etc. to produce great variants of practical solutions to solve issues in industry as well as society.
Online publishing
The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (begun in 1995) is a dynamic reference work of terms, concepts, and people from philosophy maintained by scholars in the field. MLA Commons offers an open peer-review site (where anyone can comment) for their ongoing curated collection of teaching artifacts in ''Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments'' (2016). The ''Debates in the Digital Humanities'' platform contains volumes of the open-access book of the same title (2012 and 2016 editions) and allows readers to interact with material by marking sentences as interesting or adding terms to a crowdsourced index.
Wikimedia projects
Some research institutions work with the
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
or volunteers of the community, for example, to make freely licensed media files available via
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all of the Wikimedia projects in ...
or to link or load data sets with
Wikidata
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license ...
. Text analysis has been performed on the contribution history of articles on
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
or its sister projects.
Criticism
In 2012, Matthew K. Gold identified a range of perceived criticisms of the field of digital humanities: "'a lack of attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality; a preference for research-driven projects over pedagogical ones; an absence of political commitment; an inadequate level of diversity among its practitioners; an inability to address texts under copyright; and an institutional concentration in well-funded research universities".
Similarly Berry and Fagerjord have argued that a digital humanities should "focus on the need to think critically about the implications of computational imaginaries, and raise some questions in this regard. This is also to foreground the importance of the politics and norms that are embedded in digital technology, algorithms and software. We need to explore how to negotiate between close and distant readings of texts and how micro-analysis and macro-analysis can be usefully reconciled in humanist work."
Alan Liu has argued, "while digital humanists develop tools, data, and metadata critically, therefore (e.g., debating the 'ordered hierarchy of content objects' principle; disputing whether computation is best used for truth finding or, as Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann put it, 'deformance'; and so on) rarely do they extend their critique to the full register of society, economics, politics, or culture."
Some of these concerns have given rise to the emergent subfield of Critical Digital Humanities (CDH):
Some key questions include: how do we make the invisible become visible in the study of software? How is knowledge transformed when mediated through code and software? What are the critical approaches to Big Data, visualization, digital methods, etc.? How does computation create new disciplinary boundaries and gate-keeping functions? What are the new hegemonic representations of the digital – 'geons', 'pixels', 'waves', visualization, visual rhetorics, etc.? How do media changes create epistemic changes, and how can we look behind the 'screen essentialism' of computational interfaces? Here we might also reflect on the way in which the practice of making-visible also entails the making-invisible – computation involves making choices about what is to be captured.
Negative publicity
Lauren F. Klein and Gold note that many appearances of the digital humanities in public media are often in a critical fashion. Armand Leroi, writing in ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'', discusses the contrast between the algorithmic analysis of themes in literary texts and the work of Harold Bloom, who qualitatively and phenomenologically analyzes the themes of literature over time. Leroi questions whether or not the digital humanities can provide a truly robust analysis of literature and social phenomena or offer a novel alternative perspective on them. The literary theorist
Stanley Fish
Stanley Eugene Fish (born April 19, 1938) is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo Sc ...
claims that the digital humanities pursue a revolutionary agenda and thereby undermine the conventional standards of "pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power".
However, digital humanities scholars note that "Digital Humanities is an extension of
traditional knowledge
Traditional knowledge (TK), indigenous knowledge (IK) and local knowledge generally refer to knowledge systems embedded in the cultural traditions of regional, indigenous, or local communities. According to the World Intellectual Property Organ ...
skills and methods, not a replacement for them. Its distinctive contributions do not obliterate the insights of the past, but add and supplement the humanities' long-standing commitment to scholarly interpretation, informed research, structured argument, and dialogue within communities of practice".
Some have hailed the digital humanities as a solution to the apparent problems within the humanities, namely a decline in funding, a repeat of debates, and a fading set of theoretical claims and methodological arguments. Adam Kirsch, writing in the ''New Republic'', calls this the "False Promise" of the digital humanities. While the rest of humanities and many social science departments are seeing a decline in funding or prestige, the digital humanities has been seeing increasing funding and prestige. Burdened with the problems of novelty, the digital humanities is discussed as either a revolutionary alternative to the humanities as it is usually conceived or as simply new wine in old bottles. Kirsch believes that digital humanities practitioners suffer from problems of being marketers rather than scholars, who attest to the grand capacity of their research more than actually performing new analysis and when they do so, only performing trivial parlor tricks of research. This form of criticism has been repeated by others, such as in Carl Staumshein, writing in ''Inside Higher Education'', who calls it a "Digital Humanities Bubble". Later in the same publication, Straumshein alleges that the digital humanities is a 'Corporatist Restructuring' of the Humanities. Some see the alliance of the digital humanities with business to be a positive turn that causes the business world to pay more attention, thus bringing needed funding and attention to the humanities. If it were not burdened by the title of digital humanities, it could escape the allegations that it is elitist and unfairly funded.
Black box
There has also been critique of the use of digital humanities tools by scholars who do not fully understand what happens to the data they input and place too much trust in the "black box" of software that cannot be sufficiently examined for errors.
Johanna Drucker
Johanna Drucker (born May 30, 1952) is an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language: letterforms, typography, visual poetry, art, and lately, digital art ae ...
, a professor at
UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...
Department of Information Studies, has criticized the "epistemological fallacies" prevalent in popular visualization tools and technologies (such as
Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
's n-gram graph) used by digital humanities scholars and the general public, calling some network diagramming and topic modeling tools "just too crude for humanistic work."
The lack of transparency in these programs obscures the subjective nature of the data and its processing, she argues, as these programs "generate standard diagrams based on conventional algorithms for screen display ... mak
ngit very difficult for the semantics of the data processing to be made evident."
Diversity
There has also been some recent controversy among practitioners of digital humanities around the role that race and/or
identity politics
Identity politics is a political approach wherein people of a particular race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social background, social class, or other identifying factors develop political agendas that are based upon these i ...
plays. Tara McPherson attributes some of the lack of racial diversity in digital humanities to the modality of
UNIX
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...
and computers themselves. An open thread on DHpoco.org recently garnered well over 100 comments on the issue of race in digital humanities, with scholars arguing about the amount that racial (and other) biases affect the tools and texts available for digital humanities research. McPherson posits that there needs to be an understanding and theorizing of the implications of digital technology and race, even when the subject for analysis appears not to be about race.
Amy E. Earhart criticizes what has become the new digital humanities "canon" in the shift from websites using simple
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...
to the usage of the
TEI and visuals in textual recovery projects.
Works that have been previously lost or excluded were afforded a new home on the internet, but much of the same marginalizing practices found in traditional humanities also took place digitally. According to Earhart, there is a "need to examine the canon that we, as digital humanists, are constructing, a canon that skews toward traditional texts and excludes crucial work by women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community."
Issues of access
Practitioners in digital humanities are also failing to meet the needs of users with disabilities. George H. Williams argues that universal design is imperative for practitioners to increase usability because "many of the otherwise most valuable digital resources are useless for people who are—for example—deaf or hard of hearing, as well as for people who are blind, have low vision, or have difficulty distinguishing particular colors."
In order to provide accessibility successfully, and productive universal design, it is important to understand why and how users with disabilities are using the digital resources while remembering that all users approach their informational needs differently.
Cultural criticism
Digital humanities have been criticized for not only ignoring traditional questions of lineage and history in the humanities, but lacking the fundamental cultural criticism that defines the humanities. However, it remains to be seen whether or not the humanities have to be tied to cultural criticism, per se, in order to be the humanities.
[ The sciences might imagine the Digital Humanities as a welcome improvement over the non-quantitative methods of the humanities and social sciences.
]
Difficulty of evaluation
As the field matures, there has been a recognition that the standard model of academic peer-review of work may not be adequate for digital humanities projects, which often involve website components, databases, and other non-print objects. Evaluation of quality and impact thus require a combination of old and new methods of peer review. One response has been the creation of the ''DHCommons Journal''. This accepts non-traditional submissions, especially mid-stage digital projects, and provides an innovative model of peer review more suited for the multimedia, transdisciplinary, and milestone-driven nature of Digital Humanities projects. Other professional humanities organizations, such as the American Historical Association
The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest professional association of historians in the United States and the largest such organization in the world. Founded in 1884, the AHA works to protect academic freedom, develop professional s ...
and the Modern Language Association, have developed guidelines for evaluating academic digital scholarship.
Lack of focus on pedagogy
The 2012 edition of ''Debates in the Digital Humanities'' recognized the fact that pedagogy was the "neglected 'stepchild' of DH" and included an entire section on teaching the digital humanities. Part of the reason is that grants in the humanities are geared more toward research with quantifiable results rather than teaching innovations, which are harder to measure. In recognition of a need for more scholarship on the area of teaching, the edited volume ''Digital Humanities Pedagogy'' was published and offered case studies and strategies to address how to teach digital humanities methods in various disciplines.
See also
* Cyborg anthropology
Cyborg anthropology is a discipline that studies the interaction between humanity and technology from an Anthropology, anthropological perspective. The discipline offers novel insights on new technological advances and their effect on culture and ...
* Digital anthropology
Digital anthropology is the anthropological study of the relationship between humans and digital-era technology. The field is new, and thus has a variety of names with a variety of emphases. These include techno-anthropology, digital ethnograp ...
References
External links
Debates in the Digital Humanities book series
Digital Humanities Quarterly
Intro to Digital Humanities
by UCLA Center for Digital Humanities
CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide
by CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative
DH Toychest: Guides and Introductions
curated by DH scholar Alan Liu
How did they make that?
by DH scholar Miriam Posner
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