Why Digital Humanities?

What it's about and why you should care

Hello, welcome back to Tomorrow's Teaching. I wanted to answer a question that I got a few times since I started this series of posts and videos: Why do we even need Digital Humanities, and who needs it?

I had colleagues of mine, philosophers, tell me, "Okay, but I am a philosopher, I'm teaching Plato. What do I need Digital Humanities for, and is it useful to me in any way?"

What It Is: A Brief Definition

The thing first is to perhaps very briefly say what Digital Humanities is. It's an intersection of humanities scholarship—you know, literature, history, and art—with digital technology that you use to enrich the way you are performing humanities research and teaching.

It involves classic ways of engaging with information technology. We all write on computers. We all send emails. We all use Google Docs when we want to send documents to each other to work on them in a collaborative way. In a sense, this is already the base level of Digital Humanities. It is humanities practice, humanities research, humanities teaching that uses digital means. This could also include making videos for your students, teaching videos. And here on Tomorrow's Teaching, on this site, we will also talk about how to do that perhaps more efficiently or by utilizing AI as part of your videos. This is also Digital Humanities.

These are entirely new methods for research, teaching, and sharing knowledge that are based on digital means in some way. And we can think of it in two different ways:

1. First, there are computational tools that we can use to explore humanities questions and learn more about the humanities.

2. Second, we can also on a meta-level ask how technology itself shapes our culture and knowledge.

What Does It Look Like in Practice?

That's a lot of theory. What can we actually do with it? Digital Humanities allows you to ask new questions and also see old materials in a new way, in a way that you had not had access to earlier.

1. Digital Archives

You have things like historical letters, historical documents, and fragile manuscripts. They always find new pieces of the Bible here and there, or the recently found scrolls in Pompeii. Now you have to decipher these materials, you have to catalog them, you want to put them in some order, and you want to publish them. The scrolls found in Pompeii need to be read, but you cannot unfurl them because then they break. So you need to find a way of reading them while they are still rolled up. You can X-ray them, but then you get multiple layers in one X-ray. You have to separate these layers. These things are best done with AI because AI is very good at this, at extracting information from complex heaps of information and noise. If AI knows what it's going to look for, it has a very good ability to filter information and to extract what you want. And so big data, which in this case is big heaps of pixels, can be processed to produce a text that would otherwise be lost.

Then you can archive these for better retrieval later. For example, you have materials like these scrolls that are too valuable to just give to students. Normally your students would not have access to these materials at all, or even researchers; most researchers should not touch something like an original piece of the Bible. And digital technologies allow us to make these materials available to them. Instead of giving the researcher the original scroll, you give them a digital copy of the scroll. And a digital copy of the scroll is much better than a physical copy because physical copies always have limitations. They are never detailed enough. While a digital copy can be made with a huge resolution that later allows the researcher to magnify it and to process it digitally further by using filters on the image, so that in the end it produces a much better, much more detailed image that the researcher can then use to do some kind of analysis on it.

2. Analyzing Historical and Literary Trends

Sometimes you have trends, historical trends, literary trends, where identifying them depends on processing thousands of sources, thousands of books. So for example, you want to see if the frequency of particular words changed between the 1960s and the 1970s. And you have pop culture novels and you want to count the words in these and you want to see if there's been any change in the frequency over the decades.

Or perhaps not even the frequency. Perhaps you want the sentiment, which is an even more difficult thing to do. You want to see, were people in the 60s more optimistic, for example, than people in the 70s about technology? Let's take this example. And so you want to read newspapers, magazines, thousands of pages of newspapers and magazines from the 60s and 70s and make a sentiment analysis. This is the kind of thing you could never realistically do well as a lone researcher with paper copies of these newspapers; this is never going to work. But digitally, you can have all these sources. You can stuff them into a computer. You can write your Python programs. And the Python program can do sentiment analysis by looking for particular words that have emotional content, that express particular attitudes, and then evaluate the sentences and find which are optimistic, which are less optimistic. There are already-made libraries for this in Python that you can use. And in the course I'm offering, Python for the Humanities, we will talk about these approaches and we will try them out and do sentiment analysis.

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3. Digital Mapping

The whole area of combining maps with information that we can put on the map is interesting. For example, an easy example would be military history or political history, where you have the various movements of armies and you want to print them on a map. Alexander the Great, for example, his battles, and you want to plot them. You want perhaps to count the distance between the battle sites and then to calculate how long it took him from one to the other and how fresh or how tired his soldiers would have been. And then perhaps also evaluate the situation of supplies for his army. Where did he get the supplies? All these things are things that you can digitally do much better than if you sit there with a ruler and a paper map.

And then you could also, of course, examine hypothetical scenarios. What if this particular battle had not taken place, but 100 kilometers further, or perhaps on top of a mountain where they would have another strategic position than they had in the original battle? And then you can make this hypothetical history and examine various other possibilities that you don't have.

Another thing with maps: you can trace the spread of ideas. So as a philosopher, for example, you could say, "We have the Eleatics. We have those philosophers of southern Italy, and now I want to see how in ancient Greek philosophy the Eleatic ideas spread over time to the other places that were influenced by Greek culture." And perhaps I can find particular words in manuscripts or particular concepts, and I want to map the spread of these concepts over time on a map. This is something that gives you a very lively image of how this philosophy developed. And this again is also very exciting for the students because now they can actually see it, they can get a feeling for it. How is it that these ideas spread? Or how was it for Alexander to move there, to go to this place? It's not just something theoretical. It's not just numbers and names in an arcane language that is long dead. But now it's something that moves on your computer screen. It's a map. It's a graphic display. You can pick up these things and move them around. You can examine other scenarios. This is fascinating. It's much more engaging for the students and it can provide insights that would be difficult to get otherwise.

4. 3D Modeling

3D modeling is very important again and very motivating for historians and archaeologists particularly. You can have archaeological sites that you create as 3D models and then you can bring your students there without having to organise an expedition or an international class trip with all the potential problems and bureaucracy that this would entail. You want to see places in the Vatican that you could never reach otherwise. You want to see places in Pompeii that would be difficult to reach or perhaps impossible or that are closed to the public. You want to bring your students, even in geology or geography, you want to bring them inside a volcano and see how this looks from the inside. It's very difficult to do these things in real life. Even such trivial pleasures like watching the Parthenon in Athens—the Parthenon itself is closed and its inside is not accessible to the public. You cannot go into this thing. But you can digitally, of course, model it and then go inside and see it, even as it was when it was first built. And you can do this either by presenting the model to your students on screen as part of a lecture or even by strapping AR glasses onto the students and then leading them in there to actually see the thing.

And this is not only important for archaeology. You can do this also in philosophy. I always bring up philosophy because I am a philosopher and because philosophers often have the question, "Is it useful for me specifically? Because yeah, of course, archaeologists are a different thing, but for us philosophers, what's the point there?"

And the point is, for example, you can show them Socrates's cell. You discuss a dialogue like Crito where Socrates is in his cell and his students visit him. And now they can see it. They can see the cell, they can even see other students of Socrates sitting there. You can model those, you can have them move around. You can make avatars. You can make it like a computer game. They can go in there and interact with Socrates. You can have a large language model trained to talk like Socrates. And then students can engage with him. They can talk with him. And they get a firsthand understanding of what it was like to talk to Socrates, of what it was like to be in this cell. And Socrates could reply with the original words of Socrates that we know from Plato.

This would help students very much, especially students from other cultures. We often as teachers don't appreciate how difficult it may be for students of other cultures to really imagine what it is like to be in this situation with Socrates or what it means to be in ancient Athens. For us who have been doing this now for years or decades sometimes, it's easy. We imagine ancient Athens and we get a relatively clear image of that. But for a student, let's say a Chinese student who's grown up in China, and now you tell him this is ancient Athens, they don't have any way to imagine this properly and correctly because it's so different from what they know from their own experience. And even where they have historical knowledge, it would be historical knowledge of ancient China, and this is not the same as ancient Greece. So if you want to give them knowledge of how it was to be in ancient Greece, there is nothing better than immersing them in a virtual environment where they can actually see the place.

And again, this doesn't need to replace classical scholarship. It's not like we say, "Don't teach them anything, just drop them into a computer game and they will be fine." This is not what I'm saying. The point is that the computer game can enhance this knowledge and it can create new interest. I know this because I've shown my children—there is this Assassin's Creed, I think it's called, I'm not a computer gamer, but there was one teaching game from the series where they made ancient Athens as a 3D environment that you could run as a computer game on your computer. And I bought this and I showed it to my children because I wanted my children, who are around 15, to see what ancient Greece was like. And we had been in Greece because I am half Greek, we had been in Athens on holidays. But you see only a few stones. For a child, it's difficult to see a few of these weathered stones and marble columns that have fallen down and then to imagine what this must have looked like. But in this game, I could bring it up to the screen and then suddenly they saw the Parthenon, they saw this whole area, they saw the people, how they dressed. They could talk with these people in this computer game, they could run around, they could see all kinds of things. And it was amazing. It was fascinating and it interested them, and they got a new appreciation for that. The next time we went to Greece, they could say, "Yes, now I know what this used to look like. I can imagine this. I have more of a physical contact and imagination that relates to this place, a memory even, as if I have been there, which in the past I did not have."

So these can be very powerful means to especially awaken the interest and awaken the fascination for these cultures that a young person naturally doesn't have because they don't know the background of that. Places that don't exist, places that are inaccessible, places that we cannot go, perhaps it's too expensive—these can all be recreated digitally and be made available to the students.

5. Digital Storytelling

We already talked about this in the context of interactive online games. But you can also use it for exhibits. You can, instead of just having one picture of, let's say in art, you have some Van Gogh picture and you just show the picture. Now with digital technologies, you could show how the picture was actually painted. You could make an animation that shows how Van Gogh would have painted this picture from his sketches and from analysis of the pigment and so on. You can perhaps see what stages it was painted in, and then you could reconstruct this, and then the students could see how this actually was done.

Which Fields Benefit the Most?

Of course, philosophy will not be the most obvious example of that. Digital Humanities can be applied everywhere. But some disciplines have more of a use for these things:

• Literature: For analyzing texts and creating rich digital editions of classic works, making classic works available. And also, for example, if you have read ancient sources, the Perseus library online and other such websites that have the feature of linking the ancient text to the word you are clicking on or linking the translation to the sentence you are reading. This is very good because it saves you so much time in looking up the translations if you can directly link to them.

• History: Of course, profits from building these digital archives and mapping historical data like we said before.

• Archaeology: Using 3D models and drones and drone footage to document and analyze excavation sites.

• Art History: Analyzing images digitally, analyzing X-ray pictures of images, creating digital galleries that reveal new connections between artists, examining influences between artists, and many others.

Why Should Instructors Engage with These Technologies?

Of course, this is the key question for most of you. "I am so busy. Why should I put this additional thing on my plate? Why should I have this new field to learn about when I'm already an expert in my field? I don't need anything new, and I already have too much to do." We all have too much to do. Few of us still have the luxury of having a lot of time. But the point is:

First, it unlocks new research opportunities that perhaps you wouldn't even have in the past. Many things in the past you wouldn't be able to do because you could not process the data. Now you can. The texts are digitally available everywhere on the internet. Most of the classic sources are available for free. And now if you are able to write a short program to make text analysis, sentiment analysis, then you can at home on your own computer in a few free weekends, you can just make analysis and write papers that previously would have been impossible. You wouldn't be able to do that, or you would need a grant for lots of people whom you hire to analyze these things. Now you can do it yourself with a little bit of Python, which by the way, you can learn in my course on this channel. So this is one thing. It gives you a lot more power for yourself.

The second thing is, of course, it gives you a lot more power to teach. You can teach much more efficiently. For me, I've been making videos for years for my students, lecture videos. And this means for me that instead of having to cover everything in class, the whole lecture, I can now point them to my lecture video. I can in class speak about the things that are interesting to this particular group while we are sitting there. And perhaps they want to talk about something that's a minor point but interests them, and I don't have to be afraid that I will not be able to cover the other points because I can always point them back and say, "Okay, the lecture is online, go there and listen to that. You don't need to get your whole lecture from this session in this classroom. So we can use this classroom to talk about whatever you like about our topic, of course, but some point that's interesting to you, and the rest you can just watch it at home." This is a great thing, and many of you are already doing it. But I think we are often doing it in a way that’s too difficult to do regularly. Recording lectures has often been something that requires the IT department to come with cameras and so on. But look: what I'm doing right now, I'm recording this with my phone. I'm just looking at my Samsung A14, an ancient, small, cheap phone. And it's not even a flagship thing or a super iPhone. It's one of the cheapest Samsung phones. And I have it stuck here in front of me on a table. I'm talking to it. And this is what you hear (if you’re reading this, you can watch the video at the top of this article). And I have an external microphone here, a small one to improve the sound a little. But this is just my phone recording this. So it has zero preparation. I'm just coming here, sitting on the corner of my bed, which is here behind me, and then I'm just talking to my phone. In this way, I can make a lecture, and there's nothing wrong with it. It looks good. I can create a lecture like this in the time it would take me to deliver the lecture, nothing more. So I can speak for half an hour, and then my students have a lecture.

It also develops essential student skills. Students learn practical skills, especially if you teach them to create Digital Humanities materials rather than just consume them. They can learn all these skills of analysis, visualization, Python programming, and 3D modeling. For example, my children now learned this in school. I was amazed to hear that in secondary school, they learn to do 3D modeling. They use these game engines and they use Blender, which is a 3D modeling program, to learn how to create 3D structures and buildings and so on. And this is an amazing skill that your students can have, and it can help them themselves. They can make projects like this. They can submit projects digitally. For example, they could learn to make a Greek column, create a model of a Greek column, a 3D geometry model of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian style, and then compare the three. And this is a kind of knowledge that will stick with them because they have done it, they have touched it, they have created it, they have researched it. It's not just learning there are these three kinds of columns and you look at them in a book. But now you're making them. It's active. The student is doing something. And young people want to do, they want to touch things, they want to explore things themselves. And these technologies give them the opportunity to do it.

Or an easier case: find out if Plato's style, if Plato's sentiment changes from the early dialogues to the late dialogues. This is something that would be very difficult to do in the past. They would have to read everything. Now they can just take the whole text of the dialogues off the internet, stuff it into a sentiment analysis, produce a graph that shows how the sentiment changes over time. And this is their own research. They're learning to do research, which is arguably the thing that our students are least good at. They are often good at memorizing, but they're very bad at doing original research. Now they can do research. They can learn how to do it by actually doing research themselves on these sources, coming up with results, writing them up in papers that they could learn to write like real scholarly papers. So you would teach them not only to actually do research but also how to actually write a paper. So that when you finally have your graduates, these graduates are able now immediately to go on and do research and write and publish a paper, rather than looking like idiots because they don't know how to write a reference list or how to get their research data processed.

So there are enormous possibilities in this whole thing to teach students valuable skills. And also, of course, if they don't manage to become philosophers in later life, which for most of them will be the case, then they have skills that they can use in other kinds of occupations. They can use these digital skills to become videographers, to become YouTube makers, to become 3D artists, freelance 3D modelers. They can use them to write online. So all kinds of things they can do with these skills: to program, to become computer programmers, developers. And this is an enormous gain again for the students and for their lives. They're not stuck with only knowledge of Pythagorean philosophy, which frankly, very few will profit from for their lives. But now they know something about Pythagorean philosophy but also about Python and programming and 3D modeling and all kinds of other things, AI use. And these things they can use to get a life later on, which is also our responsibility. We are not supposed to lead them into a situation where when they finish, they can just be unemployed. Our job as teachers, as instructors, is also to care for them in a way that's actually useful for them, not only as philosophers or historians or literature students but also as human beings who later need to earn a living somehow. And teaching itself changes from being passive to becoming active. The students go themselves from being consumers to being creators. And this is also enormously important.

Finally, you can use it to increase public engagement. Very often we are wondering how we can get more knowledge transfer and more public visibility for our projects. And all these kinds of digital resources give us this visibility. So if you have a museum with pictures that is online, then you can get millions of views on your pictures. If you have your pictures only in a gallery in your institute hallway, then nobody sees them. So exposure for artistic production, exposure for papers, exposure for digital models, all these things online, you have all these opportunities for exposure for your work and for your students' work. And this can create public interest. It can create press interest. It can come into the news. You can get interviews. You can get much more public appreciation of the work of your department or of your own work using these technologies.

It also fosters collaboration. Digital Humanities tools are naturally collaborative. They connect scholars across different departments and disciplines, and they are also geographically diverse because now you don't need to be in the same room. You can connect with other people, with other departments, with other universities. You can find people who have your own interests online and then use these digital means to collaborate on projects.

A Final Word

Digital Humanities offer a very powerful toolkit to enrich your research, to energize your teaching, to equip your students for a better future, and it ensures that humanities remain vibrant and alive for the 21st century. And it also is good for you because you grow, you learn something new, you do something that's interesting that challenges you, that gives you new skills, rather than just sitting there and working on the same problems that you have been working on for the past 30 years.

So I personally find it exhilarating to think what I can do tomorrow with new technology that I could not do today. Can I make a 3D model? Can I create a Python program? Can I make a video like this instead of just sitting there and writing a paper in the same way like I did 20 years ago? So even for curious people, and we are all probably curious to some extent, otherwise we wouldn't be scientists or scholars, for curious people, this is great. You learn a new thing, you play, and you engage with your students much more on a level that's interesting to them. So you create new friendships with your students, they take you more seriously because they see you as somebody who is interested in technology, who can help them, who has an understanding of their concerns and of their interests.

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So that's that. Thank you, and I hope that you can now see more clearly why you might need or want to engage more with Digital Humanities. We will do more of that here in this Substack and on the YouTube channel.

Please subscribe if you're interested in this and we will keep talking about these things. Watch the Python course and later we will learn how to do all these things ourselves. And I hope that you will have a lot of fun. If you ever have questions or ideas for more topics that you’d like to have discussed, just leave a comment right here: