What is Digital Humanities?
Digital humanities has a number of definitions. The Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab), a service of Yale University Library, helps scholars in their own engagement with digital tools and methods in the pursuit of humanistic questions.
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DH in Research and Practice
Leveraging a wide range of techniques from analyzing or generating materials with neural networks to immersing users in 3D virtual realities, digital humanities projects at Yale think creatively about the ways that digital materialities and methods introduce new engagements with long-standing historical and cultural questions.
As a theoretical field concerned with the ways human knowledge is created, disseminated, and experienced, DH incorporates a wide range of scholarly backgrounds (from English and History to Computer Science and Statistics) and technical methodologies (from structuralist critique and visual analysis, to data mining and network analysis).
Begin with a Question
To scope out your research question and brainstorm whether a DH lens could be useful to developing or presenting your work, or for other questions or help, book a consultation with one of our staff members.
For on-the-spot support with a project, stop by the Digital Humanities Lab during office hours.
What do DH projects look like?
Whether you want to create a graph for a course paper, build an interactive website, or develop a digital edition for your research, DH as a field contains years of collective experience to inspire your own project. The DHLab supports DH projects of all shapes and sizes, including but not limited to: creating digital text editions, building virtual exhibitions, performing analysis of all kinds (text, network, spatial), data visualization, metadata transformation, creating StoryMaps for humanists, developing machine learning algorithms, and more.
How do I get started?
As with most research in any field, DH projects often emerge from a productive central tension, from frustration with doing repetitive tasks by hand or struggles with wrangling vast amounts of data into something readable, to concern about the public inaccessibility of scholarship or difficulty visualizing text changes over time.
DH approaches can help turn tension into intervention at any stage of research development, be that as a digital materiality early in a research project when you need a virtual space to experiment with different ideas, as an intermediate tool to process data mid-project, or as a final presentation of an analog project aimed at a wide audience.
For help working out if and where DH can shape your work, or for questions or any other help, please schedule a consultation. For on-the-spot support with a project, visit us during office hours.
Contact UsResources
From consultations on project development to full partnerships on custom application design and creation, the Yale Digital Humanities Lab offers a wide range of support for DH projects, partnering with university staff, collections, and researchers of all experience levels (graduate students, undergraduates, postdocs, and faculty).
Looking to start a digital project but don't know where to begin? Need recommendations on tools, techniques, and best practices? Schedule an individual consultation with one of our staff members. For on-the-spot help, drop into our office hours.
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