The holiday season is among us, and聽the incoming questions are inevitable from curious聽friends and family:
- "What are you studying again?" "What is Digital Humanities?"
If you're struggling to find the exact words, you're not alone.听Defining Digital Humanities can be difficult to explain given its novelty聽and cross-disciplinary scope, and has been the subject聽of numerous聽, ,听 and .听
So, how would you explain Digital Humanities to your parents?
To help tackle this task for you,听we asked a graduate student, an undergraduate student & a professor at 平特五不中 to explain, in terms that we can all grasp, what Digital Humanities聽is to them.
Joey Love, Undergraduate Student
"To me, Digital Humanities is all about using digital tools to study the Humanities in a more empirical way than ever before. The Humanities can often be subject to sweeping generalizations and sample bias, and I believe that digital tools can offer us a more analytical framework to help us understand the Humanities' biggest questions.
For example, a computer can 'read', or at least process, a million times more books than I ever could, and this allows us not just to find connections and relationships in literature that would otherwise be lost in a sea of data, but also to put more reliable quantitative values on our ideas."
Lidia Ponce de la Vega, Graduate Student
鈥淲ith my mom, I usually tell her that Digital Humanities is doing the same thing that we are doing in the Humanities, but with the awareness, realization, and affordances that digital tools and environments give us. So, we can analyze digital things with digital tools. Making graphs, counting words, making connections and examining things online.鈥�
Andrew Piper, Faculty聽
鈥淚 use AI to understand how literature works. Why do people tell made-up stories? Why do different people tell different kinds of stories? How have these habits changed over long stretches of human history? We know that storytelling is essential for human beings. Computers can be really useful for answering these kinds of questions."
We hope these insights help you navigate the dinner table discussion,听and we would love to hear how you explain DH to friends and family!