A Posthumanist Reflection on the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract

The emergence of interdisciplinary studies in the digital humanities and social sciences is relevant to the development of digital technologies. Although the digital humanities were often seen as only a technical support to the “real” humanities studies in the early days, the definition of “digital” changed with the advent of the Internet in the 1990s. Scholars said that, entirely new discipline paradigms were introduced by the two waves of the digital humanities. Thus, researchers in the digital humanities and social sciences currently experience a fundamental transformation of epistemology, in addition to the introduction of new tools and methods. This article investigates this transformation from the “posthumanist” theoretical perspective. The author argues that posthumanist theories can elucidate how researchers and their digital tools coproduce knowledge. In other words, from the posthumanist perspective, this article points out that digital technologies inevitably affect current research practices and knowledge production and, more importantly, researchers also experience fundamental transformations in this coconstitution process.