As a Digital Humanist, I have often been asked the above question. At the centre of Digital Humanities is the digitisation of humanities and the humanisation of the digital. Critical questions to Digital Humanists are Can the digital be humanised or Can humanities be digitalised? Reflecting on these two interrogative expressions, Digital Humanities is the practice of digital creation and/or digital analysis and critique of digital texts. It is understanding of how digital technologies change research infrastructures and practices in humanities. The discipline centres on the use of digital models to research what it means to be human. It means critically engaging with questions of knowledge formation, dissemination, and preservation. The field focus on the creative application of digital technology to humanities questions and data.
It uses digital tools to explore, investigate, and interpret the human condition through time and space.Digital Humanities is all the ways that the humanities and digital technologies intersect.
What sets Digital Humanities apart is its genuine interdisciplinarity, its permanent emergence, and its open communication.
It carries out the kind of analysis that would be very difficult or impossible to do without the use of technology.
Digital Humanities is using technology for humanities research, teaching, and publication
It involves de-siloing scholarship in that same field through a collaboratively authored academic wiki.Digital Humanities is tools that help scholars and practitioners consider both broad swaths of creative endeavor. It is the intersection of computing and the arts.
The discipline has an artificial intelligence flair in that it is the attempt to create smarter machines and to teach people how to be smarter than the intelligent machines we create.Digital Humanities is the application of computational technology and approaches to traditional and novel problems in the social sciences and humanities.It is researchers creating new digital materials, tools, or methods in the humanities.
Digital Humanities GIVE NEW ANSWERS to old research questions using new resources, REVISIT its postulates under the light of the new methodologies, DEVELOP new forms of sharing knowledge. Digital Humanities are intersectional activities commonly convergent on ever evolving computational technologies. It is the use of digital methods to research what it means to be human.Digital Humanities means that we must build tools, technologies, methodologies, and theories that represent this disruptive force. It is the engagement and practice of the humanities with and through digital technologies.
What is often abbreviated as DH is a discipline called Digital Humanities allowing people a new possibility to access knowledge and in turn generates new knowledge. It supports the discovery of new access paths to the yet unknown and unthinkable. The field affords people new ways to distribute and publish our work and how we can analyze and manipulate information. The discipline promotes hands on experience as an important way of learning. The best way to describe DH is the intersection between human cognition and computing. It is the study of the Humanities through methods and with perspectives arising from the application of digital procedures.
The field designate a 'transdiscipline'. In other words, it is interdisciplinary in scope and methodological in nature. Digital Humanities sits on the crossing vertices of genuine interdisciplinarity and continual emergence of new practices. It is a gathering term for scholars who embrace technology as a means to explore humanities material as data. Digital Humanities is an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of digital work in the humanities. It is building, collaborating, learning and sharing.Scholars and students of DH explore the benefits computing tools, applications, and softwares offer the field of Humanities. It entails trying to offer informed guidance to the historians, linguists, literary critics, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, artists, lawyers, bankers, economists, managers, marketers, political scientists, etc. who want to use digital research tools (but can't build them).The thoughtful use of computing in humanistic inquiry and the thinking through of computing from the perspective of the traditions of the humanities.DH are disciplines of humanities developed through digital computing. It is taking people to bits.
The field is offered at University of Zimbabwe as a postgraduate programme and it is the first to be offered in Africa. The discipline has long been studied in Europe, Asia and America in top institutions such as Cambridge University, MIT, Stanford University etc. Interestingly, America has more than 65 Digital Humanities Centres (DHCs), Britain has 19 DHCs, Japan has more than 10 DHCs, China has more than 7 DHCs, etc driving digital innovations in these geographic spheres. Disturbingly, Africa has less than 2 DHCs. It is in this context that we have launched an MA in Digital Humanities at University of Zimbabwe, a postgraduate degree driven by the fourth industrial revolution. It centres on digitising humanities and humanising the digital. It's interdisciplinary in scope and methodological in nature. It's a hands-on or practically oriented degree. This makes it a money making degree because each skill acquired is a job or business in itself. Apply for MA in Digital Humanities for University of Zimbabwe 2023 February intake.
Do you want to be an expert in the following DH areas?
1) Content Management Systems
2) Big Data Analytics
3) Text & Data Mining
4) Social Media Analytics
5) Digital Storytelling
6) Digital Repositories
7) Data Visualization
8) Computation & Programming
9) Digital Collections and Libraries
10) Platforms & Software
11) Image & Video Analytics
13) Mapping & Timelines
14) Web Design & Prototyping
15) Coding & Programming Resources
16) Tools/Apps/Software
17) Animation & Motion graphics
18) Project Management & Workflow
19) Open Image & Multimedia Collections
20) CMS/Web Publishing
21) Animation & Storyboarding
22) Audio Tools
23) Authoring/Annotation/Editing/ Publishing Platforms & Tools
24) Interactive Fiction Writing Tools & Platforms
25) Code Versioning Systems
26) Crowdsourcing Tools
27) Command Line tools
28) Exhibition/Collection/Edition Platforms & Tools
29) Internal Research Tools
30) Mind-Mapping
31) Simulation Tools & Platforms
32) Corpus Linguistics Programs/Resources
33) Sentiment Analytics
34) Text Collation Tools
35) Text Encoding Tools
36) Text & Data Wrangling Tools
37) Text Preparation 'Recipes' for Topic Modeling Work
38) Topic Modeling Tools
39) Video & Film Analytics Tools
40) Diagramming & Graphing Tools
41) Infographics Tools
42) Network Visualization Tools
43) Deformance Tools
44) Stylometric Analytics
Etc.
Requirements
Any honours degree with at least a 2.2 degree class.
Contact: +263 775 896 614 for more information.
Compiled by Dr. Reggemore* Marongedze
A Digital Humanities Lecturer
Department of History, Heritage & Knowledge Systems
University of Zimbabwe
