digital humanities

digital humanities

The Impact of Digital Humanities in Modern Academia

1. Introduction to Digital Humanities

Referring to a “digital humanities” positive differentiation, the scientific practice of the human sciences changes by using digital technologies (computation or communication networks), to not only execute but mainly support and improve methodologies, as well as to organize, to quantify and to make the epistemological objectives achievable or even create new ones. The human sciences then achieve a qualitative and quantitative development; flexibility when applying procedures; strength of argumentation by collecting direct and easily verifiable evidence; and automation of operations. The digital humanities projection has several implications and can hardly mean the simple utilization of already existing computer tools. It comprises, instead, several levels of depth: at the methodological level, in charge of possible renovations and innovations in the “infrastructural” processes; at the instrumental level, enabling an efficient and effective execution of the methodologies adopted; at the organizational level, concentrating on the management and usage of the created information, up to inter and multicultural relationships, in spite of generating high-quality information for a wide variety of analytical and interpretation objectives.

Humanities studies have accompanied human knowledge and its development. Nevertheless, how we study and perceive humanities has changed substantially since Hellenism. From a pursuit to synthesize all knowledge to its coexistence with scientific and technological studies, humanities have always been considered a “soft” area of human knowledge, while the others were seen as “hard” lines of work. In the 20th century, technological and business development brought in several changes in this traditional perspective. This substantial change not only happens at the academic sphere, but also involves more than the linguistic or literary studies, bringing the “hard” matter—like rigor, quantifiability and empirical evidence—sometimes associated with exact and natural sciences.

2. Key Technologies and Tools in Digital Humanities

Overall, the goal of this tutorial is not to provide a detailed manual and how-to-use guide, but mainly to give a strong indication of the existence of these tools and the numerous possibilities and directions that are available to digital humanities communities. In addition, the goal is to provide a first step towards forging new links, establishing interdisciplinary collaborations, and encouraging the exchange of knowledge among scholars with different scientific backgrounds. One of the most impressive applications of Artificial Intelligence in collecting, annotating, and analyzing a huge set of historical news—with strong impact on both digital humanities and detection of social media propaganda and fake news disseminated by state-sponsored Argentine and British companies and agencies during the Malvinas war.

Over the years, a number of powerful instruments and platforms have been developed to address different digital humanities questions or studies without reinventing the wheel each time. These platforms are made of different open-source tools, which can be useful to our community. An indicative list in this direction, but not exhaustive, includes Scaife, LOD Visualization Platform, TextThresher, Damascus, and GephiGraph Extractor. In this section, we provide a brief but detailed introduction to these tools and platforms. For each of the aforementioned tools, we present its capabilities, functionality, and features. Then, we discuss applications and digital humanities studies that have been accomplished using the specific tool.

3. Applications of Digital Humanities in Various Academic Disciplines

Some logos in classic culture, such as semiotics, philology, and exegesis, that have found fertile ground in the heart of the most classical forms of Humanism will learn everything from the developing of the digital age. This does not simply mean to stop the defending embankment, afraid of contamination: if we do not employ new tools, we will never improve our methodology. Some digital tools, developed for quite different scopes, such as the OCR or some editions of authors, become precious analytical resources if used in ‘semantic’ mode, i.e., during the advanced stage of the philological check. Information technology can offer both a set of tools for structuring and navigating data flows and a model, a methodological paradigm addressing the question of the plurality of the ways of knowledge and communication that are typical of the humanistic culture. Clearly, a disciplinarian approach that is typical of the profession of the scholar produces a critical reaction in the electronic frontier, defined by a propensity to reduce everything to the characteristics of electrons and anarchy. The problem and the challenge consist in reducing differences without losing them. Only by favoring the combination of knowledge with different methods can we organize a critical judgment of complex issues of the current society, such as the relationship between social ethics and technology, the analysis of the human choices of economic systems that introduce coordinates in common advantageous values, the recognition of cultural peculiarities in the description of a complex world.

Approaches and resources of the digital humanities have often been applied within existing areas of research in the arts and humanities. By doing so, they have often suggested new directions and new kinds of questions within these disciplines and have hybridized existing genre forms, sometimes suggesting new directions and new genres. The digital humanities will serve all humanistic disciplines in their struggle with the unprecedented fast pace of the restructuring of the academic landscape, not only because the questions traditionally asked in humanities discourse may acquire a new dimension and a civic or political texture in the hypertextual space of the global society, but also because the interdisciplinary features that are seeping through the digital developments can generate a profound reshaping of the boundaries now defining each academic culture.

4. Challenges and Future Directions in Digital Humanities Research

The “open” movement is currently pushing academic publishers towards less restrictive publication models, and in the UK, payment of article processing charges is now permitted in the Research Excellence Framework. Yet, many fundamentally open repositories and data collections struggle to find independent financial sustainability. Great questions about the motivation of researchers in digital humanities have yet to be properly addressed to facilitate open access. Given the transformation of the academic job market, associated pros and cons of the tenure and promotion process also need to be reassessed.

To increase the diversity and impact of digital humanities, new partnerships, business models, and skill sets are needed. The adoption of new technology is usually accompanied by resistance to change because of fear of job loss or because it confronts old power structures. Yet, it opens incredible opportunities for new, often unexpected partnerships among professionals in the fields of knowledge production, publishing, and curation. By reducing barriers to entry, a variety of stakeholders can take advantage of advances in numerous academic areas.

A recent member’s survey by the Association of Research Libraries, an association that represents 123 research and academic libraries in the USA and Canada, highlighted complex management and stewardship challenges that require increased investments in technical infrastructure, data curation services, digital preservation programs and services, and new structures for collaborative governance of digital.

One primary concern of digital humanities involves standardization, interoperability, and sustainability in digitization and curation of ever-expanding scholarly content, so that researchers can search, link, reuse, and evaluate academic work easily. Researchers want to know what data is available, where and when it is from, who created it and under what circumstances, to what it can grant access, and how it can be leveraged.