Digital Humanities

Originally, the myth of the humanities are the terrain of the solitary genius, laboring alone on a creative work. However, knowledge has always been produced and accessed in ways that are fundamentally distributed. Each domain-specific expertise enables a research question to be conceptualized, answered, and then re-conceptualized and re-answered. Distributed knowledge production means that a single person cannot possibly conceive of and carry out all facets of a project.

Analogously, distributed access means that the audience for the project can engage with its content via multiple access points and platforms. When knowledge exists in iterative form across global networks and local access points, with many versions and expressions of cultural information taking shape in a process whose life cycle is ongoing, then any access to that knowledge is a performance, an instantiation.

SOURCE: Burdick, A., Drucker, J., Lunenfeld, P., Pressner, T., & Schnapp, J. (2012). Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: Massachuetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities