What is Digital Humanities, anyway? What Duke Libraries’ Collections Reveal

November 1, 2026

What is Digital Humanities?

A lot of ink has been spilled over this question. This month’s Collection Spotlight showcases the diverse range of scholarship that falls within the “Digital Humanities” umbrella.

But, seriously, what is it?

This website will give you some definitions from digital humanists in their own words. Every time you reload the page, a random definition is displayed. Some are serious, and some are cheeky.

My definition?

Anyone who is studying a topic through a humanistic lens and using technology in a critical way to interpret and/or present their research, or anyone studying technology through a humanistic lens can claim the title of “digital humanist” if they wish.

A big part of the debates about digital humanities circa 2010s was about who was allowed to call themselves a “digital humanist.” Did they have to know how to program a computer? Did they need to be using text analysis to study literature at scale? As you might imagine, many scholars felt excluded by these kinds of questions. The definition debates are key to understanding digital humanities today, however, so if you plan to engage in digital humanities some knowledge of those debates will help you avoid some potentially painful pitfalls.

I hope this Collection Spotlight gives you a chance to learn a little bit about those debates and to find a corner of “dh” (its loving abbreviation) that fits your interests and priorities. The Spotlight is organized thematically based on both areas of study, methodology, and disciplines. These categories are not mutually exclusive—many could should up in multiple categories! If you don’t find something of interest in one area, move on. What you won’t find is a section on AI. Why? Because AI can be applied in many methods on many topics. Check out the more recent dh scholarship included below to see how it shows up.

What you will find? Examples of DH scholarship by Duke faculty!

But wait! Duke Libraries has broad and rich digital humanities scholarship and training resources available to you. Before you dive into the various titles highlighted in the Spotlight,

Here are some resources that will help you continue exploring DH at Duke:

DH in DUL Newsletter
DUL DH Research Guide – or start a “digital humanities” catalog search to find journal articles as well as books!
DUL DH Consultations & Workshops
Duke DH Project Directory
Rhodes Computational Humanities Center

Emergence of DH

Digital humanities books generally fall into two categories: edited volumes of essays by a variety of different scholars or case studies that dig into a single project in detail. In this section, you’ll find some OG dh anthologies as well as some of the newest. For example:

The first Companion to Digital Humanities appeared in 2004 and focused mainly on text analysis, text encoding, and databases. It also provided a brief history of the discipline as it was entering a new era. This New Companion to Digital Humanities shows the field’s considerable expansion between 2004 and 2016 and includes many of the major names that you’ll find throughout this spotlight. It’s also a distinct snapshot of dh concern in the 2010s, including the implementation of linked open data and establishment of university dh centers.

One of the most recent anthologies, Computational Humanities differentiates between computational and digital approaches in the humanities by highlighting scholarship that is focused on data processing, be it text, image, or sound. However, it also reiterates an idea as old as the discipline of digital humanities: that collaboration is key to successful digital humanities scholarship.

Critiques of DH

From the beginning, there have been critics of digital humanities. Some particularly incendiary moments can be read in these articles. Scholars in the field, especially those marginalized by narratives about coding proficiency and hierarchies of medium (i.e. text over image and sound), have embraced this criticality as demonstrated by volumes like these:

Debates in the Digital Humanities is a seminal series of digital humanities scholarship and critique. The series has expanded far beyond the original Debates volumes, first published in 2012, however the core series still takes on the issues of the moment. The latest volume, published in 2023, highlights feminist, Latinx, and Black digital humanities while also considering dh alongside the polycrisis.

If Debates in Digital Humanities is a critical series published from within the heart of US dh, Disrupting the Digital Humanities is a volume of self-identified outsiders aiming to open up a field that had been roiled by a “hack vs. yack” debate, in which some scholars claimed that to be a digital humanist, a scholar needed to know how to program.

DH Across Global Studies

Much of what has been highlighted above privileges European and North American, and especially white, perspectives. The following volumes expand the view of digital humanities to exclude the global majority, which necessarily changes the shape of digital humanities as we consider different cultural practices, different ways of documenting those cultures, and different types of access to compute.

Global & Indigenous DH

Part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, Global Debates in the Digital Humanities directly addresses the “lack of perspectives beyond Westernized and Anglophone contexts” in dh, in some cases drawing on postcolonial theory. The volume highlights non-Western scholarship as well as alternative histories of dh.

Missing from much of mainstream dh are indigenous voices. Cindy Tekobbe’s Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces adds to the conversation a theory of digital indigeneity through case studies in Indigenous digital storytelling and decolonial meaning-making.

LatinX DH

Afro-Latinx Digital Connections is a volume offering to complicate studies in Latinx dh by focusing on uses of technologies among peoples of African descent in South America and the Caribbean, a community largely overlooked in dh. The book highlights both activist and scholarly applications of digital humanities.

The first text in this list explicitly aimed at dh in the classroom, Crossing Digital Fronteras: Rehumanizing Latinx Education and Digital Humanities offers proposals for a broader Latinx Studies curriculum as well as specific examples of digital pedagogy from podcasting to community archives from a Latinx perspective.

Black DH

The first book-length case study and Duke author, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction by Richard Jean So uses publishing data alongside key readings of individual works by authors of color to consider whether American fiction post-World War II has indeed become racially diverse.

Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality, meanwhile, centers Black thought, including Black feminism, in the practice of digital humanities research and infrastructure building. This volume is one of several that carves out a space explicitly for Black Digital Humanities as a means of providing a liberatory space for study and practice outside of a predominantly Anglophone field.

DH in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies

Many scholars apply digital humanities methods to archival materials. In New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, Roopika Risam addresses the colonial violence inherent to the development of many digital archives and the colonialist views that can be perpetuated through dh scholarship. Risam also critiques the “universalist” view of humanity inscribed in the digital record by commercial algorithms and natural language processing software—a few that has perhaps become even more relevant since the book’s publication.

Taking a case study approach, The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies edited volume considers regional digital humanities practices, again looking at archives and also highlighting multilingual dh research alongside various visualization methods and digital pedagogy.

Feminist DH

As this volume demonstrates, feminism can be applied in digital humanities in a variety of ways: from methodological applications to values-based infrastructure to pedagogy. Feminist Digital Humanities: Intersections in Practice emphasizes that feminism is not just a theory but a practice in dh.

Thinking broadly about intersectionality, and not purely from a feminist perspective, editors Barbara Bordalejo and Roopika Risam compiled in Intersectionality in the Digital Humanities and array of essays that think through the ways that intersectionality shows up in dh communities and research methods and the impact it has on ethical practice in dh.

DH Methods

This section is not at all comprehensive. If you can think of a computational method not mentioned here, there’s almost certainly a way to apply it in humanities research.

How-To Guides

Essentially a traditional programming textbook, Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities presents programming as it can be applied in the arts and humanities. It has the technical heft while being germane to many humanistic and artistic practices. It also presents a gentle approach to computing concepts, so no prerequisites needed!

Less a “how-to” guide and more a collection of case studies that give a sense of the types of questions and tools that can be applied in spatial humanities. Abstract Machines: Humanities GIS looks expansively at applications in both historical and literary studies. Though published in 2015, many of its methods remain relevant!

Images & Visualization

Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images builds on the concept of “distant reading” – see the book of the same name below! – Arnold and Tilton argue for a “distant viewing” approach to studying visual materials at scale using computer vision.

Johanna Drucker’s Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display is a seminal work that emphasizes the ongoing significance of applying traditional humanistic methods in dh, particularly for interpreting graphical images, including graphs and diagrams.

Mapping

HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities is another touchstone of dh scholarship. Published alongside an interactive web application that has since been remediated through modern web technologies, this volume proposes a concept of “thick mapping,” a practice of compiling and studying multiple layers of humanistic evidence in various forms (maps, data, audio, images, etc.).

A case study book as much as it is an exemplar of spatial digital humanities, Geographies of the Holocaust considers what it means to map human experiences of atrocity. It aims to work at multiple scales: continental, national, site-specific, and individual. Through these different scales and mapping of historical data, the volume proposes alternative ways of studying the Holocaust via digital methods.

Data & DH

Data Feminism made a real splash in the dh world when it appeared in 2020. The authors use many examples of journalistic, artistic, and activist data projects to put forth a theory of data feminism—the application of feminist theory to data science. An important read for anyone examining power through data.

Another text that problematizes the datafication of culture, particularly from a European perspective, is The Trouble with Big Data. It also studies power, invisibility, and other topics discussed in Data Feminism but from a different theoretical basis and, in some cases, emphasizing resistance to mass datafication.

Libraries, Archives & Public History

A major area of interest in dh is public scholarship, which takes on many forms. Hidden Cities: Urban Space, Geolocated Apps and Public History in Early Modern Europe presents scholarly historical research in the form of mobile walking tours and other interactive smartphone apps.

Our second Duke author to feature is a librarian! Arianne Hartsell-Gundy is Head of Arts & Humanities and Librarian for Literature. She and her co-authors present us with the second edition of Digital Humanities in the Library, a collection of essays that document how libraries and library workers collaborate with digital humanities scholars and, in some cases, provide critical dh infrastructure.

Case Studies in DH

Many of the books in this list could be considered case studies – demonstrating the application of a specific dh method, or combination of methods, to a particular research question. However, I wanted to call out this format in the spotlight to showcase the diversity of dh scholarship, including in otherwise traditional single-author monographs.

In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing In Hindi, Tyler W. Williams combines qualitative and quantitative methods to consider Hindi literary history. This is one of many such works that combine distant reading (keep scrolling!) and close reading. One interesting feature of the book are the artifact stories accompanying each chapter that examine a single historic item in relation to the chapter’s arguments.

From one of the HyperCities authors, Todd Presner, comes another dh work in traditional book form: Ethics of the Algorigthm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory combines humanistic studies of dh interventions in Holocaust Studies with large-scale studies of Holocaust testimonies. Crucially, Presner considers whether and how it might be ethical to apply digital tools to the study of genocide and to public exhibitions on genocide histories.

DH in the Disciplines

Here we come to the final section of the Digital Humanities Collection Spotlight, in which we consider books based on the traditional humanities disciplines with which they engage. This is not a comprehensive list of disciplines by any means. By this time, there has almost certainly been a digital humanities intervention in every humanities field. Instead, this list, arranged alphabetically, prioritizes works by Duke authors or woks that have made cross-disciplinary waves.

Arts, Media & Critical Making

The editors of Making Things and Drawing Boundaries bring together essays on critical theory, cultural practice, creativity, collaboration, and experimentation with a focus on physical materials and the ways we can “make” things in the (sometimes digital) humanities. While I’ve included in the Arts, Media, and Critical Making section of my list because of the focus on creativity and making, the book notably also touches on twenty different disciplines.

Another discipline-crossing book, Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms & Practices that documents born-digital literature by both artists and scholars. Again, the study of “making” in this work lands it in this category. This book is a great introduction to both dh and the study of electronic literature.

Fans of both books in this section might also enjoy Elika Ortega’s latest book, Binding Media: Hybrid Print-Digital Literature from Across the Americas.

Art History & Archaeology

Another Duke-authored volume! Digital Cities: Between History and Archaeology is co-edited by Professor Maurizio Forte. The essays in Digital Cities consider the ways cities impact digitality as well as how cities can be studied digitally. In addition to Forte’s co-authored essay on a long-running project at Vulci, a Roman archeological site in Italy (featuring former Duke postdoc and graduate student co-authors!), the work includes an essay on Visualizing Venice (see the next book!) by Provessor Emerita Caroline Bruzelius, and an essay by new media artist and professor Bill Seaman.

Visualizing Venice: Mapping and Modeling Time and Change in a City is another work that features multiple Duke authors. Born out of a long-running collaboration between scholars at Duke and in Italy, this work narrows its focus to just one city, Venice, Italy, and explores a variety of methods of study, including 3D modeling, mapping, and mobile applications. Duke authors include current and former members of the Visualizing Venice (now Visualizing Cities) collaborative Caroline Bruzelius, Kristin L. Huffman, Hannah Jacobs, Mark Olson, and Victoria Szabo.

Sound Studies

So far, many of the books on this list have focused on image and written text, with the exception of Ethics of the Algorithm. However, there is robust dh practice occurring in a field known as digital sound studies. This book of the same name is co-edited by three Duke alumni, Mary Caton Lingold (now faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University), Darren Mueller (now faculty at the University of Rochester), and Whitney Trettien (now faculty at the University of Pennsylvania), who have each become well-respected scholars since their graduate work that led to this volume.

Another case study Music, Mind, and Language in Chinese Poetry and Performance: The Voice Extended takes a long view of music, poetry, and performance as it developed in Chinese culture from c. 6000 BCE until present day. This book is another example of the ways in which “traditional” and digital methods can be combined to enrich humanistic scholarship.

History

There are many possible works to highlight in digital history, or dh scholarship in history, but this one has so far stood the test of modern time by remaining just as relevant now as when it was first published in 2003. Computers, Visualization, and History is a must-read for anyone looking to apply computer vision to any historical study.

Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World is a more recent collection of essays that sit at the intersection of medieval studies and digital humanities. Medievalists have been among the first adopters of digital methods, largely because the materials they study are not encumbered by copyright and offer up many different kinds of questions that digital and computational methods might help address, from paleography to image analysis.

Literary Studies

I’ve left hints about distant reading in several places above. Here’s one text that explains what it is and offers some early demonstrations of the method. Distant Reading by Franco Moretti is a collection of essays that applies quantitative methods to large bodies of literature to consider questions such as how literature developed as a form of cultural expression and how literature developed across cultures. The methods described Moretti names as “distant reading” as compared with “close reading.” Many critics have considered distant reading to be in opposition to close reading and therefore to be anti-humanistic. However, a number of scholars since Moretti have demonstrated the ways in which the two methods can be combined to study literature at scale without losing touch with minute textual details.

Where Distant Reading was focused on applying digital methods, We the Platform is a literary history of digital text by Duke English professor Aarthi Vadde. Vadde’s book argues that with the arrival of Web 2.0 came the capacity for millions, and now billions, of people to write in public. Vadde uses this study in part to argue that Web 2.0 made possible literary innovations that counter narratives of literary decline.

DH Pedagogy

Still with me? Way to go!

While I saved dh pedagogy for the end of the list and identified it as a separate category from everything above, dh pedagogy is a crucial part of the dh landscape. Some digital humanists work at research universities where they balance dh research with teaching. Others work at teaching-focused institutions where their dh practice shows up almost entirely in the classroom. The following two example texts show the kinds of thought that digital humanists give to developing a pedagogy that cultivates students’ critical engagements with digital technologies.

What We Teach When We Teach DH: Digital Humanities in the Classroom, is part of the larger Debates in Digital Humanities series and so bears some resemblance in the ways that essays were collected and structured. The book features case studies from a variety of disciplinary and institutional contexts, including an essay co-authored by Duke and NCCU faculty on the ways that a Mellon-funded partnership enhanced pedagogies at both institutions.

If you made it all this way, and you’re wondering how to actually get started with dh as either a student or a teacher, then The Digital Humanities Coursebook might be for you. This practical guide to dh includes project examples, tools, and platforms that demonstrate a wide range of dh methods and principles. So roll up your sleeves, put on your blue-light glasses, and dive in!