What Are Digital Humanities?

What Are Digital Humanities?

            The reading reading that we focused on had one question it sought to answer, and attempted as much through a myriad of ways, but overall the question was simply: what is digital humanities? The answer, of course, was not a difficult one as the author pointed out by googling the term in question and arriving at a fairly straightforward, if a bit lengthy, definition posited by Wikipedia. Kirschenbaum goes on to explain how digital humanities started as a small series of studies, but has grown in popularity over time. People identify as digital humanists and efforts have been made to spread the ideas and values of digital humanities as new ideas gain traction.

             I'm still at work wrapping my head around digital humanities as a whole, which in turn may be the problem. Digital humanities seems to me, and indeed seems to be defined, as anything quantified or qualified, synthesized or analyzed, or anything in between that is done using technology. In other words, quite nearly all the work I've done at college. I think my difficulty in understanding the term is due in large part because I still think of it as something I haven't encountered, when in reality digital humanities make up my day-to-day routine. I keep a blog for the writing center, manage information through emails, and construct essays that quantify and qualify information using online writing programs like Google Docs. 

             So I think it would be a better question to ask not what is part of digital humanities that we do, but rather what isn't? At least for me I can name only one: my creative journal, and even that becomes digitally recorded after a certain point. So, as becomes increasingly apparent, digital humanities permeates more and more of our daily life in this modern era, so it's little wonder that popularity and relevance for it has been on the rise.