Digital Humanities

Previously, scholars made pilgrimage of access and use artifacts or rare book where the seminar room or the lecture hall was the primary site for the transmission of knowledge. Today, the boundaries of the library, the archive, and the classroom have become more porous, interconnected, and globally extensible. The traditional learning space of the classroom has been rethought in ways that promote interactivity, discovery, and co-creation. As the contours of scholarship are undergoing a fundamental remapping through collaborations in which researchers can curate, narrate, annotate, and augment physical landscapes, the boundaries of inside and outside have become fluid.

This attention to place has resulted in the emergence of a significant sub-field of the Digital Humanities variously called "Digital Cultural Mapping" or "Spatial Humanities." It is here that geographic analysis, digital mapping platforms, and interpretive historical practices come together to form richly textured, multidimensional investigations of a place. Thick mapping thus enables an unbounded multiplicity of participatory modes of storytelling and counter-mapping in which users create and delve into cumulative layers of site-specific meanings.

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