“Digital work challenges many of these separations, promoting dialogue not only across established disciplinary lines but also across the pure/applied, qualitative/quantitative, and theoretical/practical divides.”
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 7.
When a field is emerging as Digital Humanities has been in the past few decades, one might expect much of its literature to be focused on distinguishing it as a field, marking its differences from adjacent disciplines. What makes Digital Humanities unique, and what I most appreciated about Burdick et al.’s chapter in Digital_Humanities, is the emphasis that DH is meant to be an interdisciplinary field.
I recently took the theory and methods class for the History major at Carleton, in which we discussed what distinguishes the historical field from departments such as Black and Africana Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, and American Studies. These include different foci, methods of study, and purposes. While I do find there to be value in holding these as distinct spaces for different types of inquiry and study, the prospect of a field that at its core is meant to be interdisciplinary and collaborative, as Burdick et al. describe, is quite exciting to me. This is both for its implications for intersections between disciplinary lines but also for the way it allows Digital Humanists to combine and mix methods and approaches to come to new conclusions.
I am reminded of a scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), in which J. Robert Oppenheimer is told that theory can only take him so far. To me, this rings true for humanistic studies, and thus is one of the strengths of the Digital Humanities. As Burdick et al. write, the field challenges the separations between theory and practice, qualitative/quantitative and pure/applied approaches. Removing those barriers will allow for more creative approaches to humanistic queries, increased avenues for analysis, and greater accessibility to different types of scholars and non-scholars alike.
As someone interested in public history and museum work, I am also interested in this collaborative quality for the ways it can bring information to audiences outside the academy. As digital tools have become both more sophisticated and available, the strategies that public institutions can use to engage with visitors have grown in so many ways. I see Digital Humanities as an integral part of this phenomenon, and this is largely the root of my interest in the field. As such, I am particularly excited to learn the process of digitizing, cataloging, and analyzing historical records and data to come to new conclusions and make it accessible for public audiences.
