Digital scholarship is a cross-disciplinary field of study centered on using digital tools and methods for research. This includes topics such as collecting, analyzing and visualizing data (including texts, images, and locations, among other types of data); digital publishing for public and academic audiences; digital pedagogy, including building technical skills alongside others to experiment with new-to-us tools; and digital privacy and anti-surveillance advocacy. While this guides site focuses on digital scholarship within the humanities and the interpretive social sciences (“digital humanities”), digital scholarship is a broad term that can be used fluidly to refer to other disciplines.
“Digital humanities” (sometimes abbreviated as DH) is a vast field of study that uses digital and computational methods to examine history and culture. The field brings together specialists from humanities and social sciences disciplines, technologists, cultural heritage institutions, and communities whose histories and cultures are represented by cultural heritage items.
That said, there is no single agreed-upon definition for “digital humanities.” Not only do definitions change across disciplines, like history and literature, but they also change depending on who you ask, what field they work in, and what kind of projects they’re working on. A good example of the variety in definitions and uses for “digital humanities” can be seen on the What is Digital Humanities site, a collection of distinct crowd-sourced definitions pulled from Day of DH conferences from 2009-2014.1 Click the refresh button or the New Quote button to explore some possibilities of what DH can mean.
Examples of Digital Methods
Digital scholarship can take many different forms. At the Digital CoLab,
- Digital exhibits and archives
- Databases
- Data visualizations
- Maps
- Network analysis
- Computational text analysis (distant reading)
We also teach and consult on topics like:
- Data acquisition, preparation, cleaning and processing
- Corpus acquisition, cleaning, and processing
- Scholar- and student-curated digital collections and digital exhibits of images, sounds, and other digital material
- Digital project scoping, management, and planning
- Digital harassment self-defense, anti-surveillance practices, and other digital privacy topics
- Algorithmic literacy and other everyday digital literacy topics (using AI, Google, etc.)