The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism

Abstract This chapter examines various conceptions of what digital humanities is. It then suggests that the digital humanities can be defined as an understanding of new modes of scholarship, as a change not only in tools and objects but in scholarship itself. There is no studying of the humanities separate from the digital. To study the humanities (or any kind of socially relevant, engaged-in-the-present object of inquiry) necessitates a realization that the world is now digital. There is no humanism separate from the digital. This is not about the means of study (computers to process text), nor is it about the object of the study (digital media)—although both are implicated. Rather, it is about how the idea of studying itself is altered by the existence of the digital.