The text, Digital_Humanities by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp presents a multitude of theories and general ideas of the field of Digital Humanities and its effect on current scholarship. To address each and every idea that the text poses would result in quite a long blog and would take a while to synthesize, but that being said, the very text itself and the collaborative nature of the work demonstrates some of the points that are trying to be made. Digital Humanities, as a discipline, seems to be resulting in larger collaborative works and a greater ability to synthesize large amounts of material using technology that I, admittedly, can barely comprehend. The sheer concept that certain applications can be created to analyze hand-written papyri and the mutli-lingual text it contains (p. 64) is a staggering idea. As a historian, I immediately think of the ways this kind of technology can benefit my own research and enhance and augment my work (especially for a public history and multimedia format), however the text, as a whole, extends past single disciplines and ultimately affects how we, as a group of academics, complete and compile scholarship.
Initially, what most struck me about Digital_Humanities (which has actually been a question that I have been mulling over for a while now) is the way it addresses current technology and forms of media as cultural sources to be archived. It is true that tweets and Facebook posts and scholarly blogs and even Reddit RSS feeds will one day be used by historians and other scholars in conducting research and will be primary source material that could contain a valuable amount of information. However, Digital_Humanities poses an interesting implication of this; the internet is a vast, huge space, and the amount of material produced daily is nearly unfathomable. The ability for scholars to sort through these materials to conduct research is extremely daunting and worrisome; there is no possible or feasible way for any scholar to look through every single source, catalogue it, and synthesize it to form a dissertation or larger work, at least not within any reasonable amount of time.
Further, the idea of archiving this material before it possibly disappears into cyberspace is also a concern. What do we save? What is significant enough to keep for further study? Tweets themselves, in their short character format, usually wouldn't tell much alone; in order to make any large conclusion or interpretation from these sources, you would need to synthesize a mass amount of them first before even attempting to see a pattern or larger picture. This is where Digital Humanities can be useful. While I am still fairly new to the technology mentioned in the text, the concepts and technology it does address can serve to solve these issues. Having digital components aid in research, while it almost seems like cheating, might be the only way for us as scholars to complete research in the future and even could give way to larger projects that analyze, aggregate, and classify a large amount of data that has not been looked into before. In Case Study 1 (p. 62), it is suggested that such technology could continue the de-colonizing attempts of historians and provide a new perspective on how to look at maps from an Indigenous point of view, something that has surely been attempted before, but is not as easy to visualize without the use of certain technology. Essentially, one main aspect that I find most interesting in Digital_Humanities is the implication of the ways in which research can be transformed using these methods and technologies.
Also, the text seems to make an assertion toward the future collaborative efforts of scholarship. One case study even referenced the use of crowd sourcing to complete a project that would otherwise be unfathomable for a single person or group to complete (p. 64). As the legitimacy of digital projects become accepted as valid forms of scholarship by academia, so, too, will the ability for collaboration among peers and across disciplines be accepted and even encouraged. Because the kinds of projects academics will be attempting will expand, a larger team will be required to complete the research and work. It will also be enriched by this collaboration. Using Digital Humanities as a starting point, the scale and scope of projects have the opportunity to expand and include interdisciplinary aspects that have not been approached before due to numerous constraints. I find this concept to be very promising for the field and I am definitely looking forward to see what kinds of scholarship will appear in the future as a result of this influence.
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