Digital Humanities (DH) is an intentional interdisciplinary fusion of the humanities with advanced research and digital tools. The goal of DH is to analyze, capture, create, disseminate, enrich, interpret, store, and amplify knowledge and insights to human problems and experiences of the human condition. This field should foster collaboration among a diverse group of practitioners and scholars from various academic disciplines, who acknowledge “issues of access and intersectional power” in their work. This collaboration aims to generate, build, disseminate, evaluate, and interpret their work within the DH community and the public for engagement. DH applies current technological applications and computational methods including digital archives, digital mapping, digital archeology, data mining, timeline mapping, and network analysis, emerging technologies, such as the Shared Canvas Data model, along with traditional humanities methodologies like oral histories and the Text Encoding Initiative to enhance research, interpretation, teaching, publishing, scholarly communication, and the overall integration and exploration of technologies in the field.

My definition of DH emerged from readings by Alvarado, Booth and Posner, Drucker, Kirschenbaum, Owens, Risam, Unsworth, and others, and by examining exemplar DH projects including What America Ate, The Shelley-Goodwin Archive, Photogrammar, and Constructing the Sacred, which applied a range of DH tools in practice and reflect the spectrum of DH’s tool. My definition also acknowledges the shifting definitions of DHs over time and how these shifts highlight the dynamic and evolving nature of the field, which shifted from deciding who fits in the DH camp “or under the DH umbrella” (Bobley, 2008; Ide & Mylonam, 2004; Presner, 2010) and DH’s relationship with technology, which starts as limited (Henry, 1993; Unsworth, 2006) to more intentional and complex (Cohen et al., 2008; Schnapp & Presner, 2009). The power of DH tools is evident in the highlighted projects, whose applications cover the full extent of digital and computational technologies.

Kirschenbaum highlights the “intersecting” relationship between humanities and technology, which should be intentionally designed, as reflected in what I identify as “intentional interdisciplinary fusion.” Additionally, I emphasize the need for those in DHs to engage more directly with one another and the public, as Owens promotes. My definition also acknowledges DH’s shifting emphasis from the digital technology used to focusing on the humanities of the digital (Roth, 2019). Finally, my definition recognizes the need for DHs to concern themselves “deeply” with intersectional access and to be most valuable when they promote public engagement, humanistic knowledge, and understanding (Booth & Posner, 2020).