Within this universe, the edifice of the humanities was firmly anchored in classical philology with fields such as archaeology, art history, and linguistics emerging only gradually from the shadow of textual studies.
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 6.
After just two periods of my first Digital Humanities class, I’m still deciding what Digital Humanities means to me. I, like this passage mentions, originally believed that humanities directly correlated to “humanities classes” I have taken in school, such as English and history. “Linguistics” is the word that stood out to me in this passage, as it didn’t come to mind when I thought of stereotypical humanities subjects.
I took a linguistics class last year and learned about the oral and written purposes of linguistics within language use, but also about its ever-changing relationship with technology. As technology has advanced, linguistics has become a crucial component in easing the interactions between humans and their various devices. Phones, for example, use linguistics in multiple aspects just for the purpose of texting. Siri is programmed with a phonetic language and turns our spoken word into digitized text, while predictive text uses linguistic knowledge of sentence syntax to propose the next word in your message.
When I first thought about Digital Humanities, I assumed it was the process of digitizing previously existing texts or processes. In the case of linguistics aiding texting, I realized Digital Humanities also involves the humanities humanizing the digital world. I am eager to continue exploring this dual relationship between these two academic areas while broadening my relationship with technology as a whole. I have had years of academic experience using the humanities across all of my classes, but I am new to incorporating technology into my studies and I am looking forward to familiarizing myself with this process.
