Welcome to our guide for digital scholarship in the humanities at Columbia University! This guide was written for faculty, students and librarians interested in starting a digital humanities project, or simply looking for ways to incorporate a new digital tool or technique into their existing research workflow. To learn more about what others are doing at Columbia University you can visit Digital Humanities at Columbia, which showcases projects, people, teams, courses and events related to the digital humanities.
What is Digital Humanities? An excellent definition comes from the Association of Computers in the Humanities, the professional organization for digital humanities in the United States:
Digital humanities is a broad term encompassing a wide range of subject domains and communities of practice, including computer-assisted research, pedagogy, and software and content development in humanistic disciplines like literature and language studies, history, or philosophy. DH also engages with the critical relationship between digital technologies and humanities methods, and the ways they may influence each other.
For the purposes of this guide, we are using the term digital scholarship in the humanities interchangeably to signal our focus on the research process, whether analog or digital, rather than the field of digital humanities per se. The guide approaches the subject matter from the perspective of the types of activities you may want to engage in or the genres you may want to produce.
The original draft for this guide was written by Bob Scott (former Digital Humanities Librarian) and Alex Gil, and expanded and maintained by the latter starting in 2020. The guide is not meant to be a substitute for consultation, and we encourage you to set up an appointment with a librarian to talk about your project or needs by using the contact information on the right.