Digital Methods, Tools, and Praxis
The digital humanities are defined as much by what their practitioners do — building, teaching, collaborating — as by any theory. This area covers the praxis of the field: its pedagogy, its public and collaborative methods, its multimodal forms of scholarship, and the tools and software that make the work possible.
Definition
The methods, pedagogy, collaborative practices, modes of communication, and software through which digital humanities scholarship is taught, made, and shared, including the view of building as a way of knowing.
Scope
Covers the practical and pedagogical dimensions of the digital humanities: teaching and learning DH, crowdsourcing and citizen-humanities methods, digital storytelling and multimodal scholarly communication, and the tools, platforms, and research software the field depends on. Includes the argument that building and making are themselves forms of humanistic knowledge.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How is the digital humanities taught and learned?
- How can the public contribute to humanities research?
- What new forms can scholarly communication take in digital media?
- Is building a tool a form of scholarly knowledge?
Key concepts
- Praxis
- Building as knowing
- Crowdsourcing
- Multimodal scholarship
- Collaboration
- Research software
Key theories
- Building as knowing
- Ramsay and Rockwell argued that making tools and digital objects is itself a mode of humanistic inquiry, with its own epistemology distinct from writing.
- Digital humanities as a field of practice
- The Companion to Digital Humanities surveyed the methods, principles, and applications that define the field as a community of practice.
- Generative, multimodal scholarship
- Burdick and colleagues characterized the digital humanities as generative and design-oriented, producing new forms of multimodal, collaborative knowledge.
History
The 2004 Companion to Digital Humanities helped consolidate the field's identity. Debates over the 2010s — including Ramsay and Rockwell on building as knowledge and Burdick et al.'s Digital_Humanities (2012) — emphasized praxis, pedagogy, and collaboration alongside the field's analytical methods.
Debates
- Building versus writing as scholarship
- Whether creating tools, datasets, and platforms should count as scholarly contributions on a par with traditional written argument.
Key figures
- Susan Schreibman
- Ray Siemens
- John Unsworth
- Stephen Ramsay
- Geoffrey Rockwell
Related topics
Seminal works
- schreibman2004
- burdick2012
- ramsay2012
Frequently asked questions
- Is making a database or website really humanities scholarship?
- Many digital humanists argue yes: building encodes interpretive decisions and produces knowledge, much as writing does. This 'building as knowing' position is influential, though debate continues over how such work should be evaluated and credited.