34
"STITCHING TOGETHER" DIGITIZED SOVIET-MADE MAP SHEETS
OF THE UAE COASTLINE (USING ARCGIS)
RESEARCH & CREATIVE INITIATIVES
DIGITAL
HUMANITIES
DAVID WRISLEY
What exactly has happened to the study of the
humanities in the digital age? To answer this question
one need only review the last thirty years and
remember how scholarship used to be carried out. In
order to find books and articles, we had to look
through various catalogs (card, National Union) as
well as printed bibliographies. Fledgling institutional
digital catalogs existed, but hardly contained every
thing we needed. Few journals offered digital access to
publications. A researcher's data was often stored on a
desktop computer, or even just in paper copy on a
shelf. At conferences, we arranged photographic slides
in a carousel to project them on the wall.
In today's connected world a stunning variety of
virtual, networked resources are now available to
researchers: electronic books and other platforms for
document delivery, digitized archival collections,
new environments for scholarly communication and
web publishing, open data repositories, even cloud
and high performance computing. Not all humanists
are using these resources, but increasing numbers
are, and as a result, our scholarly work is taking on a
diversity, and creativity, of new forms. The transition
to an era of"software intensive" humanities-it is,
after all, a slow change-is bringing about new
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possibilities for transdisciplinary scholarship. But
what are the implications of more machines in our
profession? Are we ready to confront the challenges
and the results of such research? How many of us
actually understand how to navigate these new
data-rich environments to our benefit?
Digital humanities have already taken root and are
flourishing in major universities in North America,
Europe, and Asia. They have also begun to take shape
in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. How
we characterize this rather rapid digital turn in
humanistic scholarship is a hot topic of debate.
Whether digital humanities now exist because of our
changing research landscape or if they are a main
driver of such change is also up for debate. It is clear
that in 2017 digital humanities mean more than just
the use of technology in the classroom or in the
office. The compatibility of traditional and digital
methods has become more and more apparent in
recent years. Different blends of traditional and
innovative methods are opening research to new
scales of analysis and to new audiences. Far from
promoting a hasty embrace of digital tools, digital
humanities cast a critical eye on the technologizing
of research and engage in serious debate about
theory and method, imagining a future world in
which we want to live.
I am associate professor of digital humanities and I
lead the divisional research initiative in digital
humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. I am both a medie
valist and a digital humanist and my research
interests span several fields. At NYU Abu Dhabi I
have been pursuing research projects about how we
might visualize intertextuality in medieval poetry
DIGITAL HUMANITIES 35