Day of Digital Humanities -31 May 2023

 Theme “Humanizing Data”.

Digital Humanities (DH)

Digital Humanities (DH) explores how culture and technology interact by systematically applying digital resources to analyse history, language, and culture. DH also analyses the application of these resources by researchers.

Rapid technological advancements and widespread cultural adoption of digital tools and mediums have provided new ways of analysing traditional humanities research areas and even created entirely new research areas.

In recent years everyday life has become increasingly dependent on technology. As such, the popularity of DH as an academic discipline has exploded in recent years.

Digital Humanities vs STEM

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are collectively known as STEM. STEM subjects are synonymous with change and progress; the humanities, on the other hand, are associated with the unchanging or eternal; these differences supposedly demonstrate their mutual exclusivity.

However, universities are moving toward greater integration among the STEM and humanities disciplines set apart in the late nineteenth century. Will the future of the humanities in higher education emerge from programs, projects, and methodologies more typical of technological universities?

Source: https://humantech.lmc.gatech.edu/goals/

Milestones in DH

The timeline depicts milestones in the history of the "Digital Humanities" or "Humanities Computing"

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 founded; Wilhelm Ott (developer of TUSTEP) learns to program (http://www.allc.org/node/210); see also his early experiments in “multimedia”: http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Ott.multimedia.mov
• 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 founded
• 1986: SGML 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:

• 1992: Etext Center founded at Virginia by Kendon Stubbs http://www.lib.virginia.edu/kls/text_only.html
• 1993: Mosaic released, IATH founded at Virginia, STG founded at Brown; EAD development begins at Berkeley.
• 1994: First edition of the TEI guidelines; Center for History and New Media founded
• 1996: First draft of XML spec released (co-edited by the North American editor of the TEI Guidelines); Digital Library Program founded at the University of Michigan; SCETI founded at Penn
• 1999: MITH founded
• 2003: HASTAC founded
• 2004: Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities

 2005-2012: DH mainstreamed:

• 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”

More DH guides ...

Stellenbosch University: Stellenbosch University collections showcase digital content from the Library and Information Service's unique digital collections and repositories

University of Cape Town: offer digitisation for curation and preservation services for a wide variety of audio-visual, photographic and paper documents