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 neural networks to 3D-immersive realities, digital humanities projects at Yale bring innovative technologies to bear on long-standing historical and cultural questions.
As both a technical and theoretical enterprise, digital humanities touches on a wide range of scholarly techniques, bringing different discplines into conversation with one another. From English and History to Computer Science and Statistics, the range of scholarly disciplines that inform digital humanities research continues to grow.
Begin with a Question
When beginning a digital humanities project, first articulate your research question(s) and then decide how and what technology can best help you answer that question.
To scope out your research question and determine whether algorithmic approaches would be meaningful, stop by the Digital Humanities Lab during Office Hours. We will be happy to discuss your project and some of the methods and tools that might be appropriate.
Office Hours (during the semester)
Mon—Thu | 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Office Hours (during winter and summer breaks)
Tues | 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
What do DH projects look like?
Digital humanities projects use a wide range of methods and appear in a variety of forms. Whether you want to create a graph for a course paper, build an interactive website, or develop custom software, the guides below outline some of the popular techniques used in digital humanities research.
DH METHODS
How do I get started?
If you're new to digital humanities and are interested in starting a project, stop by the Franke Family Digital Humanities Laboratory in Sterling Memorial Library during our Office Hours.
We also highly recommend looking at our Project Planning and Design Toolkit to learn about the steps involved in a typical project life cycle. In addition to projects at Yale, please check out projects at other digital humanities centers, including:
- Stanford's Literary Lab
- Northeastern's NULab for Maps, Texts, and Networks
- Maryland's Institute for Tecnology in the Humanities
- DHCommons Projects
Resources
Along with providing consultations during our weekly Office Hours, the Digital Humanities Lab offers a number of awards to support digital humanities research.
In addition to on-campus support, there are also off-campus and online resources that you might try. The following programs all offer opportunities for researchers to learn different digital humanities methods and theoretical approaches:
What we offer