What is ‘Digital Humanities’?

The Digital Humanities is a broad term for exploring how we understand amongst other things art, film, music, literature, popular culture, collective memory, history, and material culture through the lens of digital technologies. It is also about exploring how the use of such technologies changes the kinds of questions we can ask, as well as the way such technologies change us as scholars. It is a reflexive approach to using and thinking about the impacts of digital technologies as we pursue our research.

Students in DH tackle research questions such as: How are digital publishing, social media, and surveillance altering personal and communal identities? Can 3D modelling produce new understandings of material culture? How do we write good history through immersive media like video games?

History students pursuing the collaborative MA in DH have explored the ways industrial sounds can be used to trigger memory for oral history, the use of ‘projection mapping’ to re-insert contentious histories into public spaces, and recreating historical social networks from archives.

For a crowdsourced perspective on the many facets of the Digital Humanities, visit Jason Heppler’s ‘What is Digital Humanities‘ website. Hit ‘reload’ to load up a new definition.