Learn Digital Humanities

One of the fundamental goals of the Digital Humanities Initiative is to assist faculty and students develop competence in data mining, mapping, data visualization, and computational humanities. We currently offer non-credit options available for all faculty and students, and we are in the process of developing an undergraduate minor in Digital Humanities. The foundation of that minor will be the recently approved DH 2300 – Introduction to Digital Humanities.

What is Digital Humanities?

According to the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, it is not a unified field but “an array of convergent practices” that explore a world in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated. Today, print is absorbed into new, multimedia configurations and digital humanities recognizes that digital tools, techniques, and media have, for good or ill, altered the production and dissemination of knowledge in the arts, human and social sciences.

Of course, digital humanities is still developing. It is a young field dependent on technological advances in computational data analysis and visualization. Looking back, the first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, and stacking hypercards into critical arrays. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character. It harnesses digital toolkits in the service of the core methodological strengths of the humanities: attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique, and interpretation.

To date, Baylor University faculty have begun to embrace digital humanities research in an ad hoc fashion, generally reflecting second wave modes of engagement with the discipline. It is our hope that this site strengthens and enriches this trajectory!

Dr. Paul Martens, March 14, 2022