Digital Humanities and Networked Digital Media

What is it about?

This article discusses digital humanities and the growing diversity of digital media, digital materials and digital methods. The first section describes the Humanities Computing tradition formed around the interpretation of computation as a rule-based process connected to a concept of digital materials centered on digitisation of non-digital, finite works, corpora and oeuvres. The second section discusses “the big tent” of contemporary digital humanities. It is argued that there can be no unifying interpretation of digital humanities above the level of ‘studying digital materials by help of software-supported methods’. This is so, partly because of the complexity of the world, and partly because digital media remain open to the projection of new epistemologies into the functional architecture of these media. The third section discusses the heterogeneous character of digital materials and proposes that the study of digital materials should be established as a field in its own right.

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Why is it important?

The processes of digitization is a process of still evolving conceptual ideas and paradigmatic patterns which serve to give form to new applications and utilizations and are crucial too to understand the particular cultural forms of which the technology is a part.