What is Digital Humanities?

        Digital Humanities is a broad field of study that has recently developed over the past 65 years, when advances in technology began around the 1950s. Even though Digital Humanities is a fairly new concept; it is one that is truly difficult to define.

Jeffrey Schnapp

    As Jeffrey Schnapp, professor and founder of metaLab at Harvard University, summarizes in his work, A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities, Digital Humanities redefines the studies of the Humanities and the practices of digital media. Instead, as Schnapp suggests, the study of Digital Humanities is about:

expanding the audience and social impact of scholarship in the humanities; developing new forms of inquiry and knowledge production and reinvigorating ones that have fallen by the wayside, training future generations of humanists through hands-on, project-based learning as a complement to classroom-based learning; and developing practices that expand the scope, enhance the quality, and increase thevisibility of humanistic research.

Essentially what Schnapp explains is that Digital Humanities is the combination of the humanities division with technology. Furthermore, this means that through the study of Digital Humanities, scholars are able to discover, observe, research, and understand how people express themselves and communicate with others- through art, music, language, and philosophy- in a way that encases the advances of technology and digital media, of the present day.
Ultimately through the use and practices of Digital Humanities, our world and its scholars will be able to transform the way we express ourselves and communicate with the world around us, enabling us to reach out and communicate with people from around the world with the help of new mediums of technology.