What is Digital_Humanities?

"what is digital humanities?" is the most frequent question I have been asked by family, friends, and job recruiters. They tend to give me that surprised look in which I feel I study aliens. However, it becomes more interesting to express the importance of the field that I am studying by addressing some projects that I have worked on. In fact, mastering DH's tools is a key factor to analyze any sort of given data. I believe DH should is a fantastic milestone in which the ME region could create and analyze data that help improve people's life. It is designed for any curious person who tends to not live passively, but embrace the world and enjoy exploring its different dimensions.

According to Kirschenbaum (2014), Digital humanities’ definition is a controversial topic between textual and digital humanities scholars. He emphasized that digital humanities is a discursive construction by addressing other scholars’ perspectives of DH such as journalistic, administrative, algorithmic and opportunistic. For several years, DH was understood as a tactical term that is used in favor of operating algorithms on the network and actively mobilizing metadata through hashtags, so it represents the dualism between social media and traditional venue of professional data. Also, the article claimed that DH is “an artifact of the post-9/11 security and surveillance state (the NSA of the MLA)”. This represents the dark side critique of DH as it serves institutions’ agenda and dehumanizes DH and here lies the secret of DH, the author said. Moreover, according to Morozov, “DHers are themselves solutionists, pretenders who arrive to fix the ills of the present-day academy with tools, apps, and the rhetorical equivalent of TED talks”. The author disagrees with the previous state as he clarified that the definition of the DH is not only a great deal of construction but also who is in and who is out.

On the other hand, DH conveys as an activity of tool building that it can be best used when both textual and digital humanities scholars combine interest and investment. Furthermore, Sample (2011) believes that the tension in DH lies between who build digital tools and media and those who study traditional humanities questions using digital tools and media. In his point of view, the main purpose of DH is to reproduce knowledge “DH shouldn’t only be about the production of knowledge. It’s about challenging the ways that knowledge is represented and shared”. Thus, digital humanities have reshaped the way knowledge distributed and published fairly and widely with less need to hard book or physical attendance. It is more about sharing with the globe rather than falling on the false divide of different perspectives.

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