We begin by trying to outline what has emerged as DH.
[…] Schreibman et al. (2004: xxvi) argue that the process of knowledge representation ‘requires humanists to make explicit what they know about their material and to understand the ways in which that material exceeds or escapes representation’, and the fact that the process digital humanists follow ‘to develop, apply and compute these knowledge representations is unlike anything that humanities scholars, outside of philosophy, have ever been required to do’.
We also want to set the context for the later argument that the digital humanities need to broaden and deepen their cultural critique (Liu 2011), and introduce design and the media-specific work of software studies and media studies (Berry 2014). Indeed, the digital humanities have also developed a role in engaging the public, and as Liu argues, the digital humanities are 'ideally positioned to develop, adapt, and disseminate new methods for exchange between the humanities and the public', but also to 'create technologies that fundamentally reshape the representation of the humanities' (Liu 2012: 496-7).
Today, the field is much more multifaceted, and as we argue here, the potential for a cultural critique of computational culture offers new possibilities for the field of digital humanities (Liu 2012: 496-7). Here we want to move beyond linear narratives of the development of the digital humanities and make connections between the digital humanities and other disciplinary formations, both historically and in terms of important influences. We also want to link these to the contemporary milieu in which the digital humanities are rapidly expanding and connecting with other fields and approaches. But first, let's take a brief look at the foundations of the digital humanities, that is, computing in the humanities.
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Cf. What was the first communication? > The system always thinks of its beginning from the middle. If it is complex enough, it can ask the question how everything started.
- In its early days, humanities computing focused on supporting humanities-technical projects through the application of technical knowledge and experience.
- family tree (Scheinfeldt 2008)
- Servant/participant: treating the machine’s efficiency as a servant’ rather than as a ‘participant enabling of criticism’ (McCarty 2009).
- The term ‘digital humanities’ is of much more recent origin, and the field’s previous incarnation was humanities computing, which was strongly associated with tools and archival work, to the extent that humanities computing soon became understood as a service department providing specialized computing support work and technical assistance to other humanities departments (see Flanders 2011; Nyhan 2012).
- A series of monographs in the British Library Research series give a helpful overview of humanities computing up until the mid-1990s (Katzen 1990; Kenna and Ross 1995; Mullings 1996).
- Knowledge representation (see Sowa 2000; Schreibman et al. 2004: xxv). […] 'requires humanists to make explicit what they know about their material and to understand the ways in which that material exceeds or escapes representation'
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M. Dalbello, “A genealogy of digital humanities,” Journal of Documentation, vol. 67, no. 3, pp. 480–506, Jan. 2011, doi: 10.1108/00220411111124550.