Most museum professionals will tell you that digital is the future. The writing on the wall seems to be “do or die”: adapt and draw in new audiences or be seen as irrelevant and out of touch. If matters are truly as crucial as they appear to be, it seems natural that we attempt to establish as basic definition of the matter at hand:
What are digital humanities? What does a digital humanist do?
For this post, I rely on the expertise of two sources. The first is the introduction and glossary of “The Digital Age Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars” by Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto. The second is Chapter 24 of Debates in the Digital Humanities, entitled “The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism” by Dave Parry (found at https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/c3127960-92ee-4b32-8b69-38f87aa2d9c5).
Both discuss the digital humanities from the angle of academia, but nonetheless the wisdom from both can easily apply to more public-facing projects inside and outside of the academe, including museum and other institutions centered on the humanities.
Computers have revolutionized the world, so it’s no surprise to discover that they have also revolutionized the various disciplines of the humanities and fundamentally altered the ways in which we as humanists research. Databases chock full of scholarly sources make it easier to dig for that perfect article that fits our specific need. Many museum collections are now scanned and available online. At the click of a button, you can zoom in close to analyze the details of a Monet or compare a 19th century bonnet housed in New York to another in Paris. Newspaper archives are coming off microfilm and online. And these are but a few of the examples of how digital projects have transformed humanist study.
Our first source (Gardiner and Musto) comes attached with a handy glossary that breaks digital tools, like some of the ones mentioned above, into four neat categories. They are: text-based, data-based, image- and sound-based, and outcome-based.
Text-based tools, as the name implies, scan and sift through text, perhaps to detect and analyze patterns or highlight key words and phrases.
Data-based tools deal with databases and data collection, analysis, and visualization.
Image- and sound-based tools, essentially self-explanatory, include image and audio creation, modeling, and processing tools.
Finally, there are outcome-based tools. This category is a bit more nebulous and acts as sort of a catch all. They include blogging (the platform I’m currently using) as well as tools that aid in collaboration, brainstorming, and publication, among other things. A lot of digital museum work falls under this category and use these types of tools because they help connect scholarship to the public.
With a basic framework of the tools used in the digital humanities established, we turn to our second source (Parry). This source deals with the semantics of the digital humanities and questions how they have impacted the realm of the humanities and pushes for more to be done.
Parry, (in my opinion) correctly contends that “digital” and “humanities” no longer exist as separate components. Not only has the digital world entirely changed our way of looking at the humanities, it also has permeated every aspect of the scholastic world.
Parry already sees academics falling back inside the box – using technology to speed up their research but staying firmly locked inside the ivory tower, keeping their knowledge locked up with them. Parry urges them to look outward, to utilize the digital world and its tools to engage with the public.
Museums are the perfect forum for this work and collaborations between digital humanities departments in universities and museums could prove extremely fruitful. Museums have already begun to make strides through the previously mentioned online collections databases, blogs, podcasts, online exhibitions, and more.
An increasingly digital world means have to think more and more outside the four walls of their building in order to stay relevant. Rising to the challenge is a matter of survival.
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