Digital humanities 101

Digital humanities is the application of digital tools, methods and theory to the study of human culture and society. It’s a research methodology that can apply to many academic fields. At the most basic level, writing an essay using a word-processing program is a digital process, so you may be a digital humanist without even knowing it. 

To explain what differentiates the practice of digital humanities from traditional humanities, Miriam Posner, a digital humanist at the University of California, Los Angeles, created the framework of “sources, processing and presentation”. Here’s an overview of how each of those elements might apply in a classroom, followed by some helpful hints for getting started with digital humanities.   

Wide-ranging digital sources

Digital humanities projects can use sources ranging from a collection of novels to a list of flour prices in medieval England. What differentiates them from their hard-copy precursors is that they’re in a digital format, which allows you to build a digital collection from those sources – a database, for example – and then interrogate it computationally. While the process of gathering data may take considerable time, taking a computational approach to asking and answering research questions empowers researchers to work with data at scale quite swiftly.

Processing texts

Processing texts computationally, also known as “text mining”, may include building a dataset or text corpus, writing code to interpret it and sometimes creating a front-end experience to present your findings. Before any of that can happen, though, the texts must be clean.

The process of text cleaning seeks to remove any extraneous characters you don’t want to consider in your analysis. It’s necessary because, when optical character recognition (OCR) text is generated from an original primary source, it's often riddled with misinterpreted letters and words, along with a peppering of “garbage characters”. If you’ve ever worked with books from the 1900s on the Internet Archive, you know what I mean.

Text cleaning also involves compiling a list of “stop words”, which are the most common in the English language (or whatever language you’re doing research in) that you exclude from your text analysis. By eliminating stop words, your analysis results won’t be skewed by, for example, 12,000 instances of the word “the”, so you can instantly work with more meaningful data. This pre-processing of text probably takes up about 80 per cent of the digital humanities process. 

This type of work lends itself well to project-building in a classroom using digital humanities methods. In my classes, each week a digital humanities course involves some type of data curation or analysis, culminating in students building a digital project. This process teaches students the difference between quantitative and qualitative tools and which might be most appropriate for answering a given research question. A text-mining platform such as Gale Digital Scholar Lab offers digital tools to answer both those types of questions: it provides three quantitative and three qualitative tools, allowing students to experiment to see if the answers they’re getting when they run a chosen tool or tools are meaningful. Other platforms to consider include Voyant, which offers similar text-mining options to dig into your research data. 

Working with qualitative tools requires a great deal of interpretation. With topic modelling, for example, students must discern the connections between the individual words that make up a topic, decide why the algorithm has grouped them a certain way and then name the topic accordingly. This higher-level thinking enables them to understand the data that they’re working with. For students who may not have in-depth background knowledge, the digital humanities process is an effective, non-traditional way to provide a bird’s-eye view of a subject.

For instance, I taught a class about the centenary of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. We ran topic modelling on the digital edition of The Times, which yielded collections of words such as “tomb decoration”, “sarcophagus” and “mummy” that were grouped into topics. Students would then decide what to name each topic, based on their interpretation of the thematic connections between words. We also analysed all the different proper names and names of artefacts, from “Carter” and “Carnarvon” to “Anubis” and “canopic jar”. The varied topics students discovered gave them a snapshot view of areas they could explore further and eventually present to their classmates.

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Interactive, collaborative presentations

In a traditional, long-form essay, students develop a research question and support a thesis through a written introduction, conclusion and four paragraphs in between. The difference in the digital humanities is where and how students share their work. Non-traditional assignments and final projects might include a story map or a timeline, exploring a research narrative and offering citations as links. It might include images or video. Unlike traditional essays, digital platforms offer the possibility of interactivity and active reader engagement. 

While essays tend to be solo endeavours, digital humanities is inherently collaborative, so it offers students the opportunity to work in groups and thereby develop social-emotional skills as well as practical digital literacy skills.

Getting started with digital humanities

From my experience teaching digital humanities, here are key dos and don’ts to help you get started:

• Do break work down into 20- to 30-minute intervals to allow for periods of collaboration followed by periods of conversation. 
• Do factor in time for some of the technology to fail. 
• Do encourage experimentation as long as there is process documentation. 
• Don’t try to use too many tools or platforms at once, because you’ll spend more time troubleshooting than you do teaching. 

When you’re ready to create your first digital humanities project, I’ve found that using Bloom's Taxonomy as a framework is an excellent way to start teaching the basics. To answer questions digitally such as: “How do you log into platforms?” or: “How do you find X, Y and Z?” I use a treasure hunt as an activity to create a foundation of comfort within whatever tool I happen to be using. Then I progress through the levels of the taxonomy to help students gain understanding to apply what they’re learning to analyse and evaluate it, and then ultimately to create something they can present to their classmates or a wider audience.

No matter what subject you teach, if you approach digital humanities as an expansive framework that offers possibilities rather than problems, I believe you’ll find that it opens new doorways for research, pedagogy and creativity. 

Sarah Ketchley is an Egyptologist and a faculty member in the department of Middle Eastern languages and cultures at the University of Washington. She also teaches in the humanities and philosophy department at the University of Maryland Global Campus. 

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