This time last year, I didn’t know Digital Humanities was even a thing. In retrospect it makes a lot of sense that as technology becomes ubiquitous throughout society, people are going to want to study how and why it does. And now that I know the field exists, I am trying to learn how and why Digital Humanists study what they do, and what it can tell us about humanity in the 21st century.

So what is Digital Humanities, anyway? I could give you a Wikipedia definition, but you might as well just go read the article yourself. Besides, the field is so broad that one could argue pretty much any study at the intersection of humans and technology is a Digital Humanities study. So, I’ll focus on the subset of Digital Humanities that aligns with my personal interests and observations of the last year.

To me, the most exciting part about Digital Humanities is inter-disciplinary collaboration. As individual researchers race to discover and publish something ‘new’ before their colleagues, they can forget that great work is often borne out of teams working together toward a shared goal. Collaboration is a cornerstone of Digital Humanities, and I feel more comfortable working in this field because of that fact. The other important characteristic that drew me to Digital Humanities is its multi-faceted approach to problem solving. It’s not enough to ask the most interesting humanistic question, or to program the most efficient algorithm, or to design the most balanced experiment. A Digital Humanities researcher can mix and match methods from several fields to solve problems and produce results, and it is this unique approach to problem solving that I find most intriguing.