Digital Humanities a Program for Humanists of The Future

Abstract

Our society has inclined to Digital. What does this mean for our culture and our lives? How can long-forgotten stories and places be rediscovered with digital technology? How is social media changing our identities? The digital society presents us with new challenges and the answer can be found in humanities. In a rapidly growing and changing world, humanities are facing tremendous pressure to adapt itself to change and it is science and technology that gave it a helping hand. Humanities and Digital Technology are no longer two separate disciplines, they are complementary to each other. The study aims to see the possibilities of cultivating the English language and literature through Digital Humanities and also provide a critical perspective of the impact of digitization on human lives.

Keywords : Digital humanities, Technology, English language, English Literature.

Introduction

In the manuscript culture, one interesting thing about it is that knowledge can travel without the knower. The knower can write down whatever they have to and the knowledge can travel without the body of the knower requiring to travel. That was a certain kind of revolutionary change in the history of literature. In manuscripts, there will be few copies of a particular text. When there are copies there are interpolations and many things which would make each manuscript copy significantly different from another one and people would have to sit down and copy these manuscripts. The scholars studying would be monks, studying in their monasteries and they would be studying on their own. The monks in monasteries they can discuss with each other but they cannot discuss things with the larger scholarly community. All that change is very significant with the coming of printing where the number of books available increased exponentially. This led to an increase of books in the libraries in people’s personal collections, particularly princesses and Universities. The exchange of knowledge becomes a great deal. The invention of the print brought a certain change in the way of exchange of knowledge and in the way of knowledge production takes place and Digital is the next leap. The change in technology leads to the shifting of this possibility.

Recent advances in digital technologies have provided unprecedented opportunities for digital scholarship in the humanities. In the early 2000s with developments in communication technologies, the digital revolution emerged. A new discipline Digital humanities were digital technologies intersect with the humanities. In the context of the covid pandemic that has probably changed the traditional approaches in education. Today students of literature have to break from the tyranny of the printed text and move confidently into the fluid dynamics of interdisciplinarity.

What are digital humanities?

Digital Humanities is a field of professorial activity at the convergence of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It is the systematic use of digital resources as well as the analysis application of the humanities Digital humanities is a crossover discipline connecting the social sciences like History and Philosophy, Archeology and Anthropology, Statistics, Linguistics, literature and the art library, and information science, media studies, design, etc.

To have a clear idea of the digital humanities is to reject the idea that digital technology is invading the academy. Computers were not only, as one might expect, as mere storage for large libraries of text. The internet has enabled the use of digital files from almost anywhere on the globe. This access to information has an immense effect on the ability to undertake research in the arts and humanities.

When did digital humanities emerge?

Digital humanities subside from the field of humanities computing. In the pioneering work of Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa, which began in 1946,  and of English professor Josephine Miles. In association with IBM, Busa and his team created a computer-generated concordance to Thomas Aquinas's writings known as the Index Thomisticus. Other scholars began using the mainframe of computer’s artificial intelligence tasks like word-searching, sorting, and counting, which was more agile than processing information from texts with handwritten or typed index cards.

In the decades archaeologists, classicists, historians, literary scholars, and a broad spectrum of humanities researchers in other disciplines applied to emerge computational artificial intelligence methods to transform humanities scholarship. The first exclusive journal in the digital humanities was Computers and the Humanities, which was launched in 1966.

• The Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) association were established in 1973.
• The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) was founded in 1977.
• the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) was founded in 1978.

What are the Digital tools?

Digital humanities are at the cutting edge of applying computer-based technology in the humanities. Earlier it was called as humanities computing, the field has developed over the past forty years. At first concentrated on inventing digital tools and modeling of archives and databases for texts, artworks, and different materials. As artificial intelligence evolved computers provided increasingly sophisticated ways of operating and searching. With recent developments in digital imaging, it is now feasible to produce high-quality reproductions of books and artworks that can change our potential to study them. Digital humanities scholars use different types of digital tools for research, which may be as small as a mobile device or as large as a virtual reality lab. Some scholars prefer advanced programming languages, while others use less complex tools, depending on their needs.

DIRT (Digital Research Tools Directory) and TAPOR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) offer a register of digital analysis tools for students. A free example of an online textual analysis program is Voyant Tools, which solely needs the user to copy and paste either a body of text or a Universal resource locator URL and then click the 'reveal' button to run the program. There is a list of online or downloadable Digital Humanities tools that are aimed toward helping students and others who lack access to funding or institutional servers. Open source web publishing platforms like WordPress and Omeka also are widespread tools. There was a necessity for a consistent protocol for tagging digital texts, and therefore the  Text Encryption Initiative (TEI) was developed. The TEI project was launched in 1987 and printed the first full version of the TEI Guidelines in May 1994.

As museums, libraries, archives, and alternative establishments have digitized collections and artifacts, new tools and standards have been developed that flip those materials into machine-readable data. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), for example, have enabled humanities researchers to huge amounts of textual data. However, these advances are not limited just to text. Sound, images, and video have all been subject to these new styles of analysis. The multimedia system nature of the web has allowed Digital Humanities work to incorporate audio, video, and alternative parts in addition to text. Digital tools also can be freely accessed over the web so they can be easily incorporated into other projects, enabling the rapid diffusion of new methods, tools, and ideas across disciplinary boundaries. These digital technologies open up exciting opportunities for connecting the humanities to a wider public culture.

Conclusion

In the constantly growing and changing field of digital humanities technology and science are no longer two separate disciplines they are two sides of the same approach. Digital humanity is a program for humanists of the future.

References

1. Borgman C. L.. The digital future is now: A call to action for the humanities. Digital humanities quarterly, 3(4), 2009. 10. June. 2021