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Quote :"Preface" to Digital Humanities
[Digital humanities] asks what it means to be a human being in the networked information age and to participate in fluid communities of practice, asking and answering research questions that cannot be reduced to a single genre, medium, discipline, or institution.... It is a global, trans-historical, and transmedia approach to knowledge and meaning-making.
We're living in the age of the IT revolution. Computers and other kinds of digital devices (who can live without a smartphone nowadays?) have transformed the way we live in a way that hasn't happened since maybe Gutenberg printed that Bible.
Information technology has also changed the way we do scholarship and research. The kinds of questions we ask as scholars, how we find the answers to them, where we access information—that's all been transformed by information technology.
Burdick and Drucker's definition of Digital Humanities is important because it emphasizes just how much information technology has changed the way we do things. These scholars are pointing out that it's not just GoogleMaps that's changed how we find our way around: things like GoogleScholar, Wikipedia, and Shmoop (oh yeah), have changed the way that we do research and the way we learn.