What does “digital humanities” mean?

The first time when someone asked me what I understood under ‘digital humanities’ my answer was “the culture of groups of people on the internet and in the media, as well as the difference in personality that people get when using digital means.” The answer I gave was without much knowledge about humanities and even less about digital humanities. The only thing I knew was that humanities had something to do with culture and its people. However, in the end, my definition wasn’t bad but not good enough to get a solid understanding neither.

After reading Digital Humanities from Burdick, A., Drucker, J., Lunenfeld, P., Presner, T. & Schnapp, J. my view changed. The one thing I could tell for sure was that digital humanities will never get a solid definition because it is always changing or as the book says “Each new design opens up new problems and — productively — creates new questions.” (p. 22). This means that with every new research the question can be asked to what end humanities cover a subject and where the border line is. Anyway, this didn’t mean they were unable to help me understand what it more or less contains. They clearly mentioned “modern humanities have sought to define culture and help us gain a greater understanding of the human experience.” (p. 4). Because modern and digital humanities are very closely related, it means that digital humanities were founded from the modern humanities. So after reading this I feel confident saying that ‘digital humanities’ are modern humanities utilizing digital means in order to gather data and/or create new research topics.

Going from my first definition “the culture of groups of people …” (first paragraph) to “modern humanities that utilize ….” (second paragraph) isn’t that far from each other. The culture I referred to was actually the same as what was described in the book as modern humanities. It “includes but is not limited to, literature, philosophy, classics, … music, and design” (p. 4).

However the definition according to the book ‘ Digital Humanities’ is; “Digital Humanities is a production-based endeavor in which theoretical issues get tested in the design of implementations, and implementations are loci of theoretical reflection and elaboration.” (p13). Personally I think that combining this definition with the one i came up with at the end of the third paragraph would provide us with the clearest and broadest idea of what digital humanities is. In that case the definition would be; ‘Digital Humanities are modern humanities —incl. literature, philosophy, music,design … — as a production-based endeavor in which theoretical issues get tested in the design of implementations, and implementations are loci of theoretical reflection and elaboration, by utilizing digital means’.