“Digital humanities” is a broad term that can describe many different activities in a variety of scholarly disciplines, but generally refers to work that exists at the intersection of the humanities and computing. Work in the digital humanities is always inherently interdisciplinary and is typically collaborative. Activities that can be described as digital humanities work include:
- Preserving and sharing cultural heritage materials with digital technologies. This can include scanning books, artworks, and papers; making 3D images of cultural artifacts; and creating digital collections or digital editions of books or other works.
- Analyzing digital culture. This can include scholarly criticism of “born-digital” cultural artifacts like websites, video games, and multimedia artworks. It can also include the field of digital rhetoric, the study of how people communicate through digital media.
- Using digital methods of scholarly communication. This can include both publishing on digital platforms, which allow for greater use of multimedia and diverse ways of organizing information, and teaching with digital technologies, either online or in the classroom.
- Studying literature, history, and culture with digital tools. This can include a variety of resources for quantitative research, such as software for text analysis, network analysis, and data mining, as well as applications for mapping and various forms of data visualization.
Courses that teach these activities are offered by a variety of departments throughout the university. The minor in digital humanities offers students the opportunity to select from these courses and design a program of study that augments their major in another field.
The interdisciplinary focus of a DH program can fill gaps in the knowledge and skill sets afforded by students’ majors, providing humanities students with the opportunity to develop their technical literacy and STEM students with exposure to humanistic applications of digital technologies.