Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
Ever since digital technology began to take over our lives in the 90s, the nature of the way we study, research, and even the way we think has changed dramatically. Is it just us, or has the internet been interfering with our ability to concentrate lately? Phew. It's not just us.
There are a couple of key questions that Digital Humanities try to address. First, how can we use digital technology to better aid us in the study of literary (and other humanities) texts? And second, how has digital technology actually changed the way that we read, research, and access information?
So, on one level, Digital Humanists are interested in developing digital tools that can help us better analyze literary and other texts. On another level, they're interested in figuring out how digital technology (and the internet especially) has changed the way that we access and acquire information.
Digital Humanists are into an approach to scholarship and research that has technology at its heart. This doesn't fly with everybody: some scholars are just way more into the "traditional" approach of picking up a book, opening it, and using your own brain to analyze it.
Within the field itself, there are some important disagreements, too. One big question is whether, Digital Humanists need to know how to program. Seriously, do Digital Humanists need to know how to code? If you don't know how to code, does that mean that you can never be a real Digital Humanist? Oh no!
Well, Digital Humanists disagree about all this stuff. There are some who say that you should be able to program, and there are others who say you don't. This raises another issue that Digital Humanists disagree about: what is it that a "Digital Humanist" literary scholar does differently from a regular literary scholar?
While there's no clear consensus about any of this, there is a general understanding that Digital Humanists thinkreally hard about technology and its place in research, while other scholars may uses technology without really thinking that much about it. You might use Shmoop without really thinking about what that means—but some Digital Humanist out this sure is thinking about, theorizing about it, and writing books about it.