Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth Quotes

Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.

Quote :"An Introduction" in A Companion to Digital Humanities

Yet even a cursory glance at this Companion's table of contents reveals how broadly the field now defines itself. It remains deeply interested in text, but as advances in technology have made it first possible, then trivial to capture, manipulate, and process other media, the field has redefined itself to embrace the full range of multimedia. Especially since the 1990s, with the advent of the World Wide Web, digital humanities has broadened its reach, yet it has remained in touch with the goals that have animated it from the outset: using information technology to illuminate the human record, and bringing an understanding of the human record to bear on the development and use of information technology.

Digital Humanities is a totally broad field. That makes the field kind of hard to defined, but at the core of Digital Humanities, there are two basic ideas.

The first idea is that Digital Humanities is all about using information technology to help us shed light on and better understand literature, history, and the human record, specifically by allowing us better to analyze and comprehend texts.

The second idea is that Digital Humanists are into figuring out how we can better design and use information technology to serve the purposes of scholars interested in the human record. What types of programs, digital methods, and websites do we need to develop so that we can do our work more effectively?