What is (or are) the “digital humanities,” aka “humanities computing”? It’s tempting to say that whoever asks the question has not gone looking very hard for an answer. “What is digital humanities?” essays like this one are already genre pieces.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, « What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments? », dans ADE Bulletin, no 150 (2010), p. 55.
Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan & Edward VanHoutte (dir.), Defining Digital Humanities. A Reader, Surrey, Ashgate, 2013.
Les humanités numériques, c'est une affaire de lettreux qui jouent aux geeks.
Dominique Vinck, Humanités Numériques. La culture face aux nouvelles technologies, Le Cavalier Bleu éditions, 2016, p. 47.Digital Humanities is the discipline born from the intersection between humanities scholarship and computational technologies. It aims at investigating how digital methodologies can be used to enhance research in disciplines such as History, Literature, Languages, Art History, Music, Cultural Studies and many others. Digital Humanities holds a very strong practical component as it includes the concrete creation of digital resources for the study of specific disciplines.
Elena Pierazzo, « Digital humanities: a definition ». En ligne : http://epierazzo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/digital‐humanities‐definition.htmlDigital Humanities est le terme courant qualifiant les efforts multiples et divers de l'adaptation à la culture numérique du monde savant.
Milad Douehei, Pour un humanisme savant, Seuil, 2011, p. 22.If digital humanities is to concern itself with the full sweep of our collective past then it must, like a Klein bottle, also come to terms with the born-digital objects and artifacts that characterize cultural production in all areas of human endeavour in the decades since the advent of general-purpose computers.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, « Ancient evenings : Retrocomputing in the Digital Humanities », dans Susan Schreibman et al. (dir.), A New Companion to Digital Humanities, Wiley-Blackwell, 2e édition, 2016, p. 188.
The real origin of that term [digital humanities] was in conversation with Andrew McNeillie, the original acquiring editor for the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities.[...] Ray [Siemens] wanted “A Companion to Humanities Computing” as that was the term commonly used at that point; the editorial and marketing folks at Blackwell wanted “Companion to Digitized Humanities.” I suggested “Companion to Digital Humanities” to shift the emphasis away from simple digitization.
Matthew Kirschenbaum, « What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments? », dans Debates in the Digital humanities, 2012. En ligne. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/38
[U]ne véritable historiographie nous fait défaut. L’histoire politique ne se réduit plus depuis longtemps à une histoire événementielle, ni l’histoire des sciences à la liste ordonnée des découvertes et des découvreurs. […] Le récit standard est aveugle à la diversité non seulement des domaines, mais aussi des pays et des zones linguistiques et culturelles. Notre vulgate n’est pas satisfaisante.
Aurélien Berra, « Pour une histoire des humanités numériques », dans Critique, vol. 8-9, no 818-819, p. 617.
À vrai dire, on a affaire ici à un positivisme que je nommerais « heavy duty » : l’illusion tenace que de l’accumulation de plusieurs parties « traitées » de la même façon et de leur sommation naîtra enfin une sorte de Sens…
André Belleau, « Pourquoi je ne demanderai pas de subventions numériques pour des recherches digitales (et vice versa) », dans Surprendre les voix, Boréal, 1986, p. 216.The metrics used to weight or characterize humanities phenomena are more complex than single value systems can represent, so a network diagram that shows “relations” among various nodes in a cultural system, among documents, authors, concepts, and so on, that is grounded in a single metric value for the edge‐node relations, is painfully reductive. Relationships, whether among human beings or humanistic concepts, are dynamic, fluid, flexible, and changeable.
Johanna Drucker, « Graphical Approaches to the Digital Humanities », dans Susan Schreibman et al. (dir.), A New Companion to Digital Humanities, Wiley-Blackwell, 2e édition, 2016, p. 247.#transformDH is an academic guerrilla movement seeking to (re)define capital-letter Digital Humanities as a force for transformative scholarship by collecting, sharing, and highlighting projects that push at its boundaries and work for social justice, accessibility, and inclusion.
« About transformDH ». En ligne. http://transformdh.org/about-transformdhDo we really need guerrilla movements? Are war metaphors, or concepts of overturning and redefining, truly the right kind of metaphors to use when talking about change in the digital humanities?
« Does DH really need to be transformed? My Reflections on #mla12 », 8 janvier 2012. En ligne. http://www.rogerwhitson.net/?p=1358Digital Humanities, though claiming to be new and revolutionary, are structured in a very classical way for an academic field, where those who master the english language and the english speaking and impact factor based academic journals are the most visible (and the most quoted).
Frédéric Clavert, « The Digital Humanities multicultural revolution did not happen yet », 26 avril 2013. En ligne. https://histnum.hypotheses.org/1546
Extrait de Quantifying Digital Humanities, Melissa Terras, 2012. En ligne. http://melissaterras.blogspot.ca/2012/01/infographic-quanitifying-digital.html
L'historien de demain sera programmeur ou il ne sera plus.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1968.Every scholarly community has its disagreements, its tensions, its divides. One tension in the digital humanities that has received considerable attention is between those who build digital tools and media and those who study traditional humanities questions using digital tools and media.
Mark Sample, « The Digital Humanities is not about Building, it's about Sharing ». En ligne. http://www.samplereality.com/2011/05/25/the-digital-humanities-is-not-about-building-its-about-sharing
[La prosopographie consiste] en la définition d'une population à partir d'un ou de plusieurs critères, puis à l'établissement à son propos d'un questionnaire biographique dont les diverses variables serviront à la décrire dans ses dynamiques sociale, privée, publique, voire culturelle, idéologique ou politique, selon la population et le questionnaire retenus.
(Björn-Olav Dozo, Mesure du littéraire, 2011, p. 12)The expansion to the web, coupled with the availability of satellite imagery, data providers, and map APIS from Google to OpenLayers, took away the time-consuming aspect of having to acquire basemaps and learn abstruse software. It empowered an entire generation of mappers who were now able to create web maps with just a little bit of programming knowledge.
Todd Presner et David Sheppard, « Mapping the Geospatial Turn », dans Susan Schreibman et al. (dir.), A New Companion to Digital Humanities, Wiley-Blackwell, 2e édition, 2016, p. 204.