I interpret digital humanities as a continually evolving field that has a fluid definition of utilizing technical tools to help analyze, study, and share humanities-related information. The field is often characterized by ongoing debates and welcomes new interpretations of existing data while tending to “gatekeep” ideas that feel too exclusionary, as described by Elizabeth Callaway’s “The Push and Pull of Digital Humanities: Topic Modeling the ‘What is digital humanities?’ Genre”. In her work, she details how newcomers tend to feel an inviting and excluding dynamic in the Digital Humanities (DH). For one, she elaborates that DH initiatives such as open-access projects are designed to be open, collaborative, and inviting. The accessibility of information encourages scholars from various disciplines to contribute, lowers the barriers to entry, and flattens hierarchies that discourage participation from different skill levels. However, the duality of DH can also be that despite its intentions for wide-access to humanities-related information, scholars from traditional humanities backgrounds may feel excluded due to the expectation of possessing technical skills. With the amount of data available online, the ability to code and perform data analysis can prove to be effective in not only better understanding the information and disseminating it to others as well. People that specialize in the arts may feel an implicit expectation to be proficient in these skills which may lead them to feel as if they do not belong. To add on, according to the “Debate in the Digital Humanities” by the University of Minnesota Press, the discipline can tend to lack diversity in the demographics of scholars. North American and European perspectives and those of senior scholars tend to dominate, making newcomers struggle to find their place.
Though technical abilities may prove to be important in the field, the value of Digital Humanities is more so in interpreting the data the tools provide rather than mere generating statistics. Interpretation from scholars can bring context to information, giving it cultural, social, or historical significance. Scholars can bring their expertise and intuition from a variety of fields to assess the assumptions, limitations, and also biases of the data collected or selected, further underscoring that technical mastery is not the only aspect of significance in DH. Ways to lower these barriers that discourage people from participating would be to create more accessible guides and tutorials so that everyone can feel included.
In summary, I interpret digital humanities as a field that seeks to study and spread humanities-related knowledge to be interpreted by people from a variety of disciplines. Though at times DH may feel exclusionary to those who may not be proficient in data analysis, the value of it comes not from producing the digital content and numbers we see but rather interpreting its contextual significance. The most important part of digital humanities is the community that participates in it and the inclusivity of new ideas and perspectives. Geographic and demographic diversity is limited but with increased accessibility and ease of contribution, these aspects of the field can be improved.