Transcription
What is digital humanities? I would define it as a methodological laboratory, kind of a trading zone where people from the humanities, but also from computer science, meet and exchange knowledge and try to find new methodologies, new techniques, to research whatever subject topic they are researching. And I think that can be researched by itself, which is not all too often acknowledged, I think. But it certainly is also sort of a methodological commons that creates spin-off in the form of new technologies, new techniques, new methods, that can be used by humanities researchers and humanities at large, or humanities proper, as it were.
I think digital humanities is a flag; it's somewhere that we can gather around, whether in times of feast or famine, so we may use the term and all of the components that accrue around that—so networks and publications and conferences and so on—in order to find people with whom we want to collaborate and venues for publications; so finding, finding other, other people working in this area. But also, it's sometimes helpful to know who your friends are, sometimes helpful to know other people who are working with similar concerns and difficulties, particularly ones that arise around interdisciplinarity.
For me, digital humanities is, really what we can say, is the future of the humanities disciplines. Coming from more traditional humanities backgrounds myself and seeing the reality that it's a discipline that struggles to be relevant today in many ways—not that we don't need the research in archeology or linguistics or any of these sorts of things—but it doesn't necessarily prepare us to do the same sort of work that we need to be doing today. Research is often very slow; it takes a lot of time. You think about the work that we do in archaeology; I mean, you can be out there for months doing one small thing at a time and getting these snippets of the past, whereas with digital humanities, where we begin to apply a new technology to the fields of research that we're working on, it opens up entirely new lines of investigation and, at the same time, prepares us to be able to do things in many different areas.
Digital humanities is the application of computational techniques to cultural heritage. There is a nice quote from Thomas Pynchon who says that, once wrote that, a miracle is the intrusion of a world into another world, so I do think that digital humanities actually is a miracle because it's combining two different worlds with many, many implications, with implications that go from the practical to the pragmatics, creating digital editions, digital libraries, to conceptual and theoretical ones, so to realize, what actually are humanities. And in particular, I think a very important point is the relationship between the humanities and the sciences.