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