Daniel J. Cohen

Defining the Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities is currently undergoing a reconfiguration at McGill. The Digital Humanities Initiative is bringing together digital humanists from across a number of faculties for the first time. Yet it is not clear what Digital Humanities actual are: this central problem arises from the vast potential the digital age presents for humanities scholarship. Key to the dilemma is whether Digital Humanities itself is something distinct from analog humanities, or whether it is merely the reconfiguration of humanities itself using digital technologies and media. At the same time, for many Digital Humanities also offers important opportunities for reconsidering the place of the humanities within society itself. Not only are digital technologies, media, and social models reconfiguring public life, they are also offering new avenues for intellectual engagement and the ways in which humanistic studies as well as artistic creation enters into, and becomes active in, the public realm. Moving forward with Digital Humanities at McGill requires rigorous consideration of the potentials presented by digitization, and the problems presented by the inability to satisfactorily define or categorize what it is the Digital Humanities does or seeks to do – and the implications of both. And so, this lack of definition is our overarching heuristic.