Digital Humanities and networked digital media

Abstract

This article discusses digital humanities and the growing diversity of digital media, digital materials and digital methods. The first section describes the humanities computing tradition formed around the interpretation of computation as a rule-based process connected to a concept of digital materials centred on the digitisation of non-digital, finite works, corpora and oeuvres. The second section discusses “the big tent” of contemporary digital humanities. It is argued that there can be no unifying interpretation of digital humanities above the level of studying digital materials with the help of software-supported methods. This is so, in part, because of the complexity of the world and, in part, because digital media remain open to the projection of new epistemologies onto the functional architecture of these media. The third section discusses the heterogeneous character of digital materials and proposes that the study of digital materials should be established as a field in its own right.