Digital Humanities

 Hello friends,

What is your answer if someone may ask you who you are? The answer may be quite simple is ‘Human’. Now question is that do we have humanity and if yes then what is humanities? We consider humanities is something which distinguish humans among other social animals. Does it really true? Because in which era we are living is the age of information, knowledge and rather of virtualization and digitalization. In this very present time, we should be very careful that humanities are also digitalized and that’s why as digitalization has brought advancement it has also brought more affects. Now-a-days human styles and cultures are also been replaced by digital humanities.

It would be more surprising to know, Computers can writer better poems rather any humans! Human has invented technology, but what if the technology is able to replace human itself? Now, it is the question which needs solution at this very tremendous situation of clash. From last several years we are thinking that will technology be capable of replacing teacher or not? We can answer to this question that what is the role of teacher in the class? If teacher’s role is to provide only knowledge than teacher will definitely be replaced by technology! For this we must know the difference between knowledge and teacher and thus we still need teacher in the class along with the technology not to explore information but for knowledge.

What is Digital Humanities?

Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, whose origins reach back to the 1930s and 1940s in the pioneering work of English professor Josephine Miles and Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa and the women they employed. In collaboration with IBM, they created a computer-generated concordance to Thomas Aquinas' writings known as the Index Thomisticus. Other scholars began using mainframe computers to automate tasks like word-searching, sorting, and counting, which was much faster than processing information from texts with handwritten or typed index cards.  In the decades which followed archaeologists, classicists, historians, literary scholars, and a broad array of humanities researchers in other disciplines applied emerging computational methods to transform humanities scholarship.

‘People who say that the last battles of the computer revolution in English departments have been fought and won don’t know what they’re talking about. If our current use of computers in English studies is marked by any common theme at all, it is experimentation at the most basic level. As a profession, we are just learning how to live with computers, just beginning to integrate these machines effectively into writing- and reading-intensive courses, just starting to consider the implications of the multilayered literacy associated with computers.’

—Cynthia Selfe

In "What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?" Matthew G. Kirschenbaum explains why the emerging field of digital humanities finds its institutional home, most often, in English departments. Kirschenbaum suggests that:

·      Since the inception of the computer, text has been easy to input into computers and easy for computers to manipulate. Computers have therefore been a part of English studies for a long time, particularly in the areas of stylistics, linguistics, and composition.

·      In the 1980s and 1990s, the personal computer and the development of the commercial web gave rise to experimental writing (hypertext fiction) and scholarly efforts to digitize and archive canonical text (such as the Rossetti Archive). The study of hypertext fiction and digital archives has been conducted largely from within English departments. 

·      The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in e-books, e-readers, and massive-scale textual digitization projects, reinforcing the close connection between digital technology, reading, and textuality (6)

What is doing in English Classroom?

DIGITAL PROJECTS BY ENGLISH FACULTY

1. Bent Not Broken: A Family Remembers the War in Liberia and Sierra Leone
2. Spring: The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society
3. 18thConnect Workshop
4. Praxis ESOL, Educational Testing Service
5. The I Witness Holocaust Archive

Work cited:

“Digital Humanities.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 Feb. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities.

“Grand Valley State University.” Digital Humanities and the English Department - Department of English - Grand Valley State University, www.gvsu.edu/english/digital-humanities-and-the-english-department-278.htm.

Matthew , Kirschenbaum. “PDF.”