Introduction to Digital Humanities

Exploring the Intersection of Humanities and Technology

Meng Liu

What is digital humanities?🤨

What is digital humanities?🤨

Write down three keywords that come to mind.

What is digital humanities?🤨

🤔 What patterns do you see in the word cloud? Any suprising entries?

What is digital humanities?🤨

What is digital humanities?🤨

What is digital humanities?🤨

What is digital humanities?🤨

What is digital humanities?🤨

What is digital humanities?🤨

“Digital humanities work is done at the intersection of computational methods and humanities materials.”

– Johanna Drucker, 2021 📚

• 🔀 Intersection of computation and humanities
• 🔗 Combines traditional disciplines with digital tools
• 🤝 Collaborative and interdisciplinary
• 🔄 Iterative and public-facing
• 🔓 Open and accessible

Components of DH Projects

1. 📁 MATERIALS
2. ⚙️ PROCESSING
3. 🎨 PRESENTATION

DH Materials

• 💾 Digital or digitized humanities sources
• 🖼️ Examples: texts, images, audio, video
• 📈 Often large-scale datasets

DH Processing

• 🧮 Computational methods and tools
• 📊 Data analysis and modeling
• 🤖 Machine learning and AI applications

DH Presentation

• 📊 Visualizations
• 🗄️ Digital archives
• 🖱️ Interactive platforms
• 🗃️ Databases

Example: Mapping the Republic of Letters

🍿 Watch a video about the project

Example: Mapping the Republic of Letters

What it is

• 🌐 One of the largest Digital Humanities initiatives worldwide
• 🏛️ Stanford-based project with international collaborations
• 🚀 Groundbreaking effort in historical data visualization

Example: Mapping the Republic of Letters

What it does

• 🗺️ Maps and analyzes intellectual networks of the 17th-18th century Enlightenment
• ✉️ Visualizes over 200,000 letters exchanged by key historical figures
• 🔍 Reveals patterns of knowledge exchange across Europe and the Americas

Example: Mapping the Republic of Letters

Can you identify the core components of this DH project? 🧐 (quick learning check!)

• 📁 MATERIALS
• ⚙️ PROCESSING
• 🎨 PRESENTATION

Example: Mapping the Republic of Letters

Can you identify the core components of this DH project? 🧐

• 📁 MATERIALS: Letters and correspondence of Enlightenment thinkers
• ⚙️ PROCESSING: Network analysis, geospatial mapping
• 🎨 PRESENTATION: Interactive visualizations of intellectual networks

Example: Mapping the Republic of Letters

🧐 How is the project different from a traditional humanities project? Discuss in pairs to identify key differences between traditional humanities and DH.

Digital Humanities vs Traditional Humanities

Traditional Humanities:

• 🔎 Limited by human reading capacity
• 🧑‍🏫 Often individual research
• 📚 Primarily books and articles
• 🖋️ Close reading and interpretation
• 🏛️ Focus on canonical works
• 🗂️ Manual data collection and analysis
• 🌐 Geographically limited research scope
• 🕰️ Time-intensive archival research
• 📊 Limited quantitative analysis
• 🎭 Emphasis on qualitative methods

Digital Humanities:

• 📊 Handles large datasets and corpora
• 👥 Often team-based, interdisciplinary projects
• 🖥️ Diverse digital outputs (visualizations, databases, etc.)
• 🔍 Distant reading and pattern recognition
• 📜 Inclusion of non-canonical texts and artifacts
• 🤖 Automated data collection and processing
• 🌍 Global reach through digital archives
• ⚡ Rapid processing of vast information
• 📈 Advanced statistical and computational analysis
• 🔀 Integration of quantitative and qualitative methods

Reflection

💡 Does humanities need computational methods?

🧑 Are we losing the “human” in digital humanities?

⚖️ How might DH methods transform your area of study?

Discuss with a partner, then share with the class.

The End