Digital Humanities (DH) is a collaborative method that employs technology for performing scholarship and disseminating knowledge in humanities disciplines and in the humanistic social sciences. Digital Humanities also encompasses the development and use of innovative technological tools for teaching and learning. Digital Humanities further encourages creative engagement with technology and critical consciousness of technology’s complex effects in our daily lives and on our wider world.
Most DH work is project-based, and virtually every DH project is a collaboration. DH project collaborators typically include at least one humanist or social scientist with a problem to be solved and one or more computer scientists who collaborate in designing a computational method or digital tool for approaching or solving the problem. Project teams frequently mix faculty members and students from different disciplines, so cross-campus collaborations are common in DH work.
While the project may be the primary unit of DH labor, DH is also a lively intellectual field with a growing body of theory, lively debates, and an emerging set of values including
- Openness and accessibility
- Democratization of knowledge
- Interdisciplinarity and collaboration
- Equity, diversity, and equality
- Proper credit for all project contributors
- Sustainability and extensibility of projects
- Experimentation
- Reflection
- Facilitation of humanistic interventions in the public square
