Digital Humanities

Paper No. - 3

 Literary Criticism.

Name :- Dharti makwana 

Batch :- 2019-2021
Semester :- M.A. Sem-2

Roll No. :- 5
Enrollment No. :- 2069108420200024 
Submitted  :- Smt. S.B.Gardi Department of English, M.K.Bhavnagar University 
Email :- dharteemakwana789@gmail.com
Paper No. :- Literary Criticism 
Topic :- Digital Humanities 

Digital Humanities 

✍Introduction:-

The Internet has changed business, education, government, healthcare, and even the ways in which we interact with our loved ones-it has become one of the key drivers of social evolution.Therefore, in a growing digital world where billions of people around the globe are being absorbed by the magic of the virtual spaces. 

Their multimedia and the boundless mobility they offer, old schools in the humanities have been alarmed by the rapid and uncontrolled change that made it ridiculous for researchers to investigate Man-related phenomena and issues in the same way they used to do a few decades ago. 

Most of, if not all, disciplines, branches and sub-branches in the humanities have been coupled with the adjective ‘digital’ so that new disciplines are founded to respond to a world that is tremendously digitized mostly in its Northern part (Japan, Europe and North America). 

One can now google the word ‘digital’ and add it to any discipline: linguistics, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, education, politics, literature, etc.

So, new sub-branches have forcibly come and internet into the smallest aspects of humans’ life. More speedily than ever, humanity has been digitalized and/or digitized due to the merging of new media technologies into every single angle of people’s daily life. 

This has led contemporary    of their inquiries to closely inspect how our humanness is/will be expressed in a world shaped by algorithms and bordered with virtual frontiers.

■ What is Digital Humanities

It is necessary to understand how digital humanities as a wider field is described as the new technology-driven tools and methods to traditional humanities disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy. There upon Digital Humanities is

"The digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. It is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope. It involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form. It studies how these media affect the disciplines in which they are used, and what these disciplines have to contribute to our knowledge of computing." 

Also termed as ‘humanities computing’, the editors of a companion to Digital Humanities who introduced the term abruptly in 2004 as an expansion of what was commonly referred to as' embracing the full range of multimedia’. 

In his book "The Emergence of Digital Humanities", Steven E. Jones explains that as a new model, DH emerged more or less concurrently with the new context associated with the new developments in technology of essays published online in 2004 and a hardcover book in 2005.  

Blackwell’s Companion to Digital label of convenience for the moment for what all humanists will be doing relatively soon as an umbrella term for a diverse set of practices and concerns, all of which join computing and digital media with humanities. 

We can see how written text can be converted into the digital form. So it can be easy to access the words, sentences and other things. which we want in a few minutes rather than to take much time.

Rafael Alvarado argues that we have a genealogy, a network of family resemblances among provisional schools of thought, methodological interests, and preferred tools, a history of people who have chosen to call themselves digital humanists  a social category, not an ontological one. 

He is supported by Matt of Digital Humanities survey as a ' term of tactical convenience’. Kirschenbaum in his essay ‘What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?’reminds us of the Humanities in 2004. 

 

Here, I have put down some of the questions that may be defined by what Digital humanities make humans. The new possibilities represented by digital for teaching and scientific research: how will these change the teaching of humanities? What contribution can humanistic cultural criticism make to the digital revolution? 

However, we also intend to reflect on Digital Humanities as a new disciplinary area, bringing out new questions: how to form the new figure of the digital humanist? What knowledge is called upon to define Digital Humanities as a field of study, research and training? How to recognize, classify, describe and evaluate research in the Digital Humanities sector?

For the moment, we know that Digital Humanities tries to model the world around us through success and failure in order to arrive at a better understanding of what we know and do not know about humankind.     

■ Benefits of Digital Humanities

• Integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches -

You can present and interlink digitized text, images, and 

time-based media with maps, timelines, data, and visualizations. Which can help to easily understand and to healthy interaction.

• Content management and data -

You can mine, map and reorganize the resources – whatever you need to uncover trends, themes and key learnings.

• Quicker access to information through.         digital access - 

This means more people can review, see and learn from the project. You are also able to more easily search through the data, combine different data sources, hyperlink to relevant background materials, and more.if we have any difficulties in identifying meaning words or the real context of the picture we can easily access through it.

• Enhanced teaching  - 

Digital Humanities helps students learn by being able to see more than the limitations of books and bondage of subject, experience more, and collaborate together. Which would be beneficial for 

them to enhance the learning process and skills.

• Improved collaboration - 

Digital resources and environments can provide a common platform for project development, research, to create a new way to expand the collaborative ideas and group-sourcing of materials, and facilitate local, regional and global partnerships.

• Public impact -

Education cannot be limited behind closed doors and blackboards. Smart classes are becoming a norm and teachers should consider the interactive method of teaching. Use of Google classroom, online quizzes, various groups, flipped learning, blogs etc. 

Opens up communication the projects extend beyond the classroom and make a public impact.  Not only does this help show the value of the study of Humanities, but digital projects can also help inform and engage those outside the university setting.

💻 What’s Digital Humanities doing in 

English Departments?

Matthew Kirschenbaum is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the College of Information Studies at Maryland. 

He served previously as an Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) for over a decade.

As Matthew G. Kirschenbaum has given the five reasons why Digital humanities have had an impact on English Department as it goes along with it. Actually traditional text is not given all components which we want so the computer helps to make it easier to manipulate. 

• First, after numeric input, text has been by far the most tractable data type for computers to manipulate. Unlike images, audio, video, and so on, there is a long tradition of text-based data processing that was within the capabilities of even some of the earliest computer systems and that has for decades fed research in fields like stylistics, linguistics, and author attribution studies, all heavily associated with English departments. 

• Second, of course, there is the long association between computers and composition, almost as long and just as rich in its lineage. 

• Third is the pitch-perfect convergence between the intense conversations around editorial theory and method in the 1980s and the widespread means to implement electronic archives and editions very soon after; Jerome McGann is a key figure here, with his work on the Rossetti Archive, which he has repeatedly described as a vehicle for applied theory, standing as paradigmatic. 

• Fourth, and at roughly the same time, is a modest but much-promoted belle-lettristic project around hypertext and other forms of electronic literature that continues to this day and is increasingly vibrant and diverse. 

• Fifth is the openness of English departments to cultural studies, where computers and other objects of digital material culture become the centerpiece of analysis. I’m thinking here, for example, of the reader Stuart Hall and others put together around the Sony Walkman, that hipster iPod of old.

🔺️ To wind up :-

The learning about code or other pieces of realizing a DH project, helps you understand issues, limitations, opportunities. We might not have seen otherwise understand why DH has treated some opportunities as low-hanging fruit and others as blue-sky wishes.

Digital Humanities neither a field, a discipline, nor a methodology. It is not simply the humanities done with computers, nor is it computer science performed on topics of interest to the humanities. DH is the result of a dynamic dialogue between emerging technology and humanistic inquiry. For some, it is a scholarly community of practice that is engaged in a wide variety of projects but that collectively values experimentation, collaboration, and making.

◾Citations 

• Kozinets Robert V (1998) Book review of D. Owram’s Born at the Right Time, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. 18(3) 455-457. 
• “Bio.” Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, 13 Nov. 2018,
• Kaplan Frédéric, “A Map for Big Data Research in Digital Humanities.” Frontiers, Frontiers, 18 Apr. 2015,
• Schreibman S, Siemens R, Unsworth J (2018) A Companion to Digital Humanities. Blackwell Publishing. Malden, MA, Oxford, and Carlton, Blackwell Publishing, Victoria, UK, pp. 28-611.
• Steven E Jones (2013) The Emergence of the Digital Humanities London, Routledge, UK.
• Alvarado R (2011) The Digital Humanities Situation. The Transducer.  
• Matthew G Kirschenbaum (2010) What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments? ADE Bulletin, pp. 150.7.