Digital scholarship refers to the forms in which researchers apply digital tools and methods to their workflows, publishing and instruction. 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 the Digital Scholarship Services guides site focuses on digital scholarship within the humanities and the interpretive social sciences (“digital humanities”), digital scholarship is an inclusive term that can be used fluidly to apply to any area of study.
“Digital humanities” (sometimes abbreviated as DH) is a area of study focused on hands-on engagement with digital and computational methods to cultural studies. This area of study has the potential to bring together specialists from humanities and social sciences disciplines, teachers, technologists, cultural heritage institutions, and local communities to apply their unique perspectives and skills towards common goals.
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. 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, we support engaging with some of the following:
- 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.)