The digital humanities, or “DH,” refers to a scholarly field, community, and set of pedagogical practices in which humanists use computational methods to analyze artifacts and data. The digital humanities are interdisciplinary, since it can involve collaborations between historians and engineers, computer scientists and poets, librarians and philologists, and many others. Digital humanities projects can involve creating software tools that redefine what it means to analyze literature or simply using existing software tools to enrich research and teaching methods within the humanities. Other projects focus on preservation and accessibility by using technologies such as 3D printing and virtual reality tools to reproduce historical artifacts, sites, and artworks for other researchers to view and analyze.
Digital humanities can be thought of as an additional “lens” a humanist scholar might use to support more traditional forms of humanist analysis. Alternatively, the digital humanities often involves taking a critical look at computing and software programs themselves in the same way one might look at literature or historical objects to explore silences, biases, and power structures involved in computing. The digital humanities community typically aligns with the “open movement” as it values open data, remixing, and rethinking data representation and visualization, as well as redefining scholarly publishing.
This guide was created by Nicole Oglesby and is maintained by UT Libraries. It provides an overview of digital humanities tools, resources, publishing, and projects happening at UT and beyond. For more information on the field itself, please browse the Introductory Readings.
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This guide was created by Nicole Oglesby as a part of a capstone project, under the supervision of Ian Goodale. It was updated in Fall 2019 by Brenna Wheeler.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.
