The New York Times features the wide-open field of digital humanities today with an article about the growth of digital work in history, languages, and other liberal arts. The article explains digital humanities as prioritizing “method” over theory or interpretation:
Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.
Interestingly, it also places this epoch in historical context, comparing it to previous periods such as the 19th century, when “practical issues of discipline building, of assembling an annotated biography, of defining the research agenda and what it means to be a historian” were matters of the greatest import to humanities scholars.
Read the whole thing here.