DIGHUM 100: THEORY AND METHODS IN THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES

As an area of scholarly research, digital humanities (DH) acts as a bridge between the Arts and Humanities, on the one hand, and the Sciences on the other hand, and therefore cultivates the ability of each student to translate between these disciplines. In order to make such translations, DH projects take a ‘both-and’ approach: it begins with the artisanal craft of the Arts and Humanities through imaging, digitization, and digital curation; it then prepares the relevant sources for critical analysis (i.e. exegesis and hermeneutics) through qualitative analysis, tagging, encoding, and linking datasets with the same specialist knowledge from each discipline within the Humanities through computational tools; it then approaches these curated sources empirically, posing new questions which are conducted through exploratory data analysis, visualization, and documentation; lastly it deals responsibly with the interpretation of the results, and conveys any assumptions made through testing the reproducibility and replicability of the study at hand. DH projects exemplifying these methods have proven to be transformative for their fields and departments in the Arts and Humanities, and across the academic landscape. They have allowed for cross-disciplinary engagement not only at the theoretical level, but also the levels of qualitative and quantitative analysis.

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