Parsing the humanities

By Suzanne Bowness. Everything you wanted to know about digital humanities. If you’re old enough to remember a time before the Internet, cast your ears back to this sound: Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkaking tshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding.
That’s right. That’s the irritating – and maybe for some nostalgic – ring of an old-fashioned modem connecting your computer to the Internet (with phonetics borrowed from The Atlantic).
Now, imagine yourself back in the era when that sound was a novelty, particularly in the quiet halls of an English or history department, where the loudest ambient noise up to that point may have been the quiet swish of pages turning. Or perhaps a pencil scraping lightly at their margins. If you were that reader, hearing that “ding” for the first time, you might have looked up from your book and wondered what exactly was going on. You might have heard the birth of a new discipline called the digital humanities.
For most digital humanities scholars, even that time-frame of the mid-1990s is a bit late. They date the field’s origins to well before modems and the Internet, although at first it didn’t really have a name until it was called humanities computing and later, digital humanities. Read more...