A genuine handshake with digital technologies facilitates humanities research. Photo: TUCHONG 

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Digital humanities are a methodological innovation brought about by the infiltration and intervention of digital technologies into the field of humanities research. To truly become a method for reconstructing humanities research, digital humanities must be further advanced and developed in the “humanistic” dimension.

Visualized text-based interpretation  

In general, digital humanities are understood as using digital technologies as a method to study related issues in humanities. Subjectivity is a vital aspect of humanities research, which is why the intervention of factors such as “individuality,” “characteristics,” “differences,” and “historical specificities” in humanistic research are emphasized, as well as the involvement of factors such as researchers’ “emotions,” and “values” in research activities. Digital humanities research, as an interdisciplinary fusion of humanities research and digital technologies, involves two trends: the first involves utilizing digital technologies to address humanistic issues; the second trend focuses on developing digital technologies in a humanistic approach.

As a research method, digital humanities share a common pattern of treating cultural classics as encodable information, transforming daily life into traceable data, labeling value systems with identifiable signs, and presenting a new digital textual form through word frequency software, data statistics, and related visualization methods. Digital humanities researchers then interpret the meaning based on this visualized text. By focusing on this research method and its process, we can explore the interweaving, infiltration, and conflicts between digital humanities and traditional humanities research, and consider how to effectively integrate digital approaches and humanities.

Whether engaging in literary interpretation, art analysis, or metaphysical contemplation based on conceptual abstraction, researchers rely on their direct understanding of symbolic information in classic literature and their firsthand experience of human lifestyles in the everyday world. The digital humanities method involves processing the literature information and behavioral activities through data and visualization, resulting in a new textual form. Consequently, the cognitive, understanding, and interpretive activities of digital humanities researchers do not directly engage with the “facts themselves,” but rather with the visualized textual form that has been “processed/created” through “secondary processing.” If the classic literature and behavioral activities are considered the “primary texts” of humanities research, then the new textual form created through the digital humanities method can be viewed as the “secondary texts.”

The application of digital humanities methods has enriched the depth of humanities research. In traditional humanities research, researchers primarily grapple with two levels of problems: the “primary texts” (i.e. classical documents and behavioral activities) and the “metatexts.” Digital humanities research has enriched the humanities research with a research level of “secondary texts.” The “secondary texts” digitize the “primary texts,” encompassing researcher’s problem awareness, theoretical presuppositions, and value judgments in this process. However, the “secondary texts” formed through data visualization serve only as an enhancement to auxiliary functions such as storage, retrieval, and statistical analysis of extensive humanities information, and is insufficient to complete the entire process of humanities research as an independent research method. Digitalization of humanities research also requires validation, tacit understanding, and interpretation to realize the generation of new humanities knowledge.  

Cross-analysis 

Digital humanities are committed to continuously enriching, developing and improving digital technologies and tools that can be applied to humanities research, aiming to build a repeatable and generalizable system and method. The effectiveness of this set of methods should be validated from two aspects simultaneously: the feasibility of the technical approach and the efficacy of humanistic analysis. 

The humanistic characteristics in the refinement of tools manifests in the infusion of traditional humanities research knowledge, skills, experiential insights, and value systems into the digital humanities. It is also a crucial method for digital humanities to enhance its statistical precision.

The problems to be solved in digital humanities research in terms of knowledge production are much more complex than those in traditional humanities research. With the development of artificial intelligence technologies, digital humanities methods will continue to be upgraded, and the dominant role of “human” factors in the “human-machine” relationship may decline, with the “machine” potentially controlling and replacing the “human.” Humanities scholars often harbor an instinctive hostility towards digital humanities methods, believing that this research isolates researchers’ perceptual experience in the face of the “primary texts,” and cedes the power of humanities research to know, understand, interpret and judge to software programs. The optimal is neither wholehearted embrace nor avoidance, but rather a sincere handshake. 

Zeng Jun is a professor from the College of Liberal Arts at Shanghai University.

Edited by ZHAO YUAN