An Introduction:
Digital humanities is an academic discipline that explores the intersection between digital technologies and culture.
Digital Humanists are Individuals who use digital methods to delve deeper into subjects like history, literature, and art. It is a field that integrates all forms of research and explores traditional subjects in a different way. Digital Humanities is a field that requires an assemblage of collaborative work with people from many different scholarly disciplines and even graduate students. They all come together to compile data in order to build digital team projects. These projects entail gathering data on a certain subject topic that involves combining facts and statistics about the specif topic of research, then presenting it digitally-not directly detailing the research subject. The article "What we think we build and what we build in Digital Humanities" - by Williams G. Thomas, introduced the question "How does scholarly practice change with Digital Humanities?" The first observation made was that most ventures in Digital Humanities start as computerized information, hence the reason why the collection of archives are digitized. Digital Humanists gather, analyze and decipher that information from the archives. The design and encoding of a digital archive must be managed in a theoretical manner and so before they can be placed into an archive, the information has to be adjusted and modified. However, it might be challenging to build these archives specifically as it relates to digital humanities. For instance, Digital history has yet to fully confront or challenge the range of document types that they might wish to archive. They have learned how to build models of legal case files, for example. But when it comes to topics such as slavery, the vast amounts of intellectual information behind the encoded archives becomes unmanageable (Thomas, 2011).All of these challenges made digital humanists realize that there is a dire need for partnership with libraries in order to make information about this academic field available. "Thomas stated that Digital humanities can be indicated by three characteristics. These qualities are significant however they are met by several challenges."
*The expansion of the range of information- it is a challenge to support large amounts of data with infrastructure ( databases or archives) and it will also be hard for the masses to interpret different concepts nationwide.
*There is also a challenge in overcoming language barriers and copyright laws around the world by bringing all the sources together and creating relations among cultural records.
*Lastly, there is a challenge with incorporating and crediting the contributions of all project members. There is a need to add in everyone's work so that further academic advancements can be accommodated.
Additionally, Digital Archivist with the National Digital Information Infrastructure & Preservation (NIIPP) -Trevor Owens, urges digital humanists to translate their coded data into text. Creating a scholarly program requires proper documentation of your work along the way since it can possibly develop into a new classification of humanities (Owens 2011). At the end of each program that a digital humanist creates, they should make it a tradition to write out what they learned and to do a complete reflection of the entire process. Thomas added that Digital Humanists should ask themself the following questions: "Did I accomplish what I aimed for?" "What did I learn along the way that can assist me in improving my next project?" All these questions that I too ask myself as a student. Self-reflections worked for me and created room for my self-improvement in many aspects of my life. A proper self-assessment can help anyone to become a better Scholar.
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Citations:
Owens, T. (2011). Please Write it Down: Design and Research in Digital Humanities [Blog]. Retrieved from http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/please-write-it-down-by-trevor-owens/
Thomas, W. (2011). What We Think We Will Build and What We Build in Digital Humanities [Blog]. Retrieved from http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/what-we-think-we-will-build-and-what-we-build-in-digital-humanities-by-will-thomas/
Young-Powell, A. (2021). Study Digital Humanities: All you need to know [Blog]. Retrieved from https://www.study.eu/article/study-digital-humanities