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By admin

Of all of the points made in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s essay, “The Humanities, Done Digitally,” the following made an especially pronounced impact on me.

“Digital humanities as it is currently practiced isn’t just located in literary studies departments; the field is broadly humanities based and includes scholars in history, musicology, performance studies, media studies, and other fields that can benefit from bringing computing technologies to bear on traditional humanities materials.”

The above passage (paragraph 7) stood out to me for its mentioning of the different aspects of the humanities. Although digital history is the primary focus of study, it is important to note that the digital humanities encompass many other fields, including music and other performing arts. Technology of the modern age that focuses on these art forms is extremely commonplace, be it applications such as Spotify and Youtube, or digital music libraries and theatrical criticisms, but they are rarely thought of as a subfield of the humanities.

“The state of things in digital humanities today rests in that creative tension between those who’ve been in the field for a long time and those who are coming to it today, between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, between making and interpreting, between the field’s history and its future. Scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally. The particular contribution of the digital humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another. These new modes of scholarship and communication will best flourish if they, like the digital humanities, are allowed to remain plural.”

This passage (paragraph 13) was interesting in the way that it reinforces the concept that the digital humanities are not just an “online” version of the previously established humanities. Instead, they integrate a modern method of communication to relay known information that can further promote discovery within the field.