The Day of DH 2012 is coming! This is a project where digital humanists across the globe report on what they happen to be doing on a particular day – which this year happens to be 27 March – to give a concrete sense of what is involved at the coalface of DH work. There are so many things to like about this project: it embodies the DH ethos of openness and sharing one’s work with as wide an audience as possible; it disregards the hierarchies that are so entrenched in academia, as anyone can participate; and it will create a resource for further study in the form of a dataset of all the posts and images, and no doubt other things such as tweets under the #dayofdh hashtag. (Oh, and I love that among the tags for tagging one’s posts is “DDH-CoffeeHouse”.)
We are somewhat preoccupied in the digital humanities with definitions of our field, something that is perhaps understandable as we are still (perceived as) relatively new to the disciplinary table. I had to come up with a definition of DH as part of my registration, so here’s my attempt:
Digital humanities is a scholarly enterprise which encompasses a field of study, a set of tools, a methodological approach, and a global community, among other things. Digital humanists examine the objects of humanistic study – literature, history, art, language and so forth – using digital tools to carry out the kind of analysis that would be very difficult or impossible to do without the use of technology. Where the value of digital humanities lies, however, is not in the powerful capabilities of the digital tools themselves – as impressive as these may be – but rather in the way that the analyses and visualizations produced by the technology are combined with the skills of critical interpretation, nuanced close analysis, and attentiveness to ambiguity which are born out of a deep grounding in so-called conventional humanities study.
So, what am I likely to be doing on the Day of DH? While I would love to be happily buried in one of my two digital projects (my edition of Canadian modernist correspondence or my digital map of modernist activity in Paris), as it is the last week of the teaching term for us at Strathclyde I will probably instead be answering a raft of emails from students panicking about their exams and final essays, trying to head off at the pass potential tech fails for the public presentations students in the TextLab course will be giving the following day, and in snatched minutes trying to write a conference paper I am giving the following week. In any case, if you’re interested, my small corner of the Day will appear at http://dayofdh2012.artsrn.
