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As my profile (and business card) currently state, I'm a "Digital Human(ist)," but I've never found a good way of explaining what that means in ~15–30 seconds that makes me sound like something more than an English Lit. major with a computer. It's hard to make an argument that the experience is valuable or that digital humanities need funding/hiring/whatever if I can't even explain to people what it is. So: Elevator pitch.

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Do you need to define the humanities in that 15-30 seconds, or is that part of your intended audience's knowledge base already? – Jenn Riley May 30 '12 at 22:35
Usually I'm dealing with academics who know what "humanities" means, but I wouldn't mind an answer that's applicable to a wider range of professional experience (and hence helpful for more other people). – M. Alan Thomas II May 30 '12 at 22:47
Is it possible to make clear(er) how this question is particular relevant to LIS? Is the goal here to talk about how as librarians we can present ourselves as being part of digital humanities? Or is the main thrust of the question about how to explain digital humanities (to other librarians?). – trevormunoz May 31 '12 at 14:28
@trevormunoz While as a cross-disciplinary field, DH finds homes in a lot of different places, it can be considered at least partially information science and is frequently taught as such; indeed it's why I went into LIS (at Illinois) in the first place. I would assume that it's as relevant a question to "libraries and informations science" as the relevant elevator pitch for librarianship or any other sub-field within our broad topic. To your question, though: Librarians might be, but are not necessarily, on either side of the conversation. – M. Alan Thomas II May 31 '12 at 21:03

3 Answers

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"I analyze broad swathes of human experience in ways that weren't feasible before computers and digital materials." Add specifics depending on what you actually do -- text-corpus analysis is a different animal from GIS is a different animal from X-raying palimpsests.

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up vote 2 down vote

Bringing digital objects, tools, and methodologies to bear on traditional humanities scholarship.

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up vote 1 down vote

Assuming that you only need to explain the "digital" part, and not what the humanities are (I have no idea how you'd even begin to do that!), the first issue I see is that one person's digital humanities is not the next person's. Definitions of the field are typically very wide, so your practice is likely very different from others'. Which makes it hard for anyone other than you to come up with a definition of what you do. You might find it useful to say both that you use technology for the process of the research itself and to convey its products - I find some folks assume only the latter is what's happening. Some other aspects of a definition that might help: increasing the scale of analysis beyond what's possible in the analog world, insights into analysis gained from collaboration with technical staff, introducing (and sharing with others) fundamentally new methods of analysis, and just opening up your portfolio to new technologically enabled things to do. That still sounds like an English major with a computer, but frankly, I think that's OK. DH is a sea-change, but it's a clear next step and not a hard break with "non-digital" humanities, IMO.

And of course, as dsalo implies, a 1-sentence example is worth 10 minutes of general explanation.

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