Introduction

Abstract

While current students have opportunities for formal digital training, most digital humanists working today point to workshops as one of their primary means for training in the field. In part, this is a result of the paucity of digital humanities programs in the 1990s and 2000s, but it is also a result of how resources have been allocated and deployed by the various sites of digital humanities work: departments, libraries, digital scholarship centers, and digital humanities research centers. Digital humanities (DH) workshops provided a way for the discipline to anchor itself and welcome newcomers without formal curricula. This volume represents the expansive definition of digital humanities that we encounter in our research and teaching, that is, a constellation of practices that engage with and interrogate the role of computing in understanding, analyzing, and representing human experience. As such, it incorporates many terms that you may be familiar with: digital scholarship, digital heritage, digital practice, and digital research. We do not firmly demarcate the boundaries, for example, between digital humanities and digital scholarship in this volume as the methods, tools, and practices often overlap. Nor, for example, do we limit ourselves by excluding work taking place in digital heritage contexts. Whether termed digital humanities, digital scholarship, or digital heritage, workshops often deploy similar pedagogical and methodological approaches and outcomes. They appeal to the same audiences and thus overlap in their goals and strategies for audience and community. Thus, this volume represents the ecosystem that digital humanities workshops exist within. Sometimes they take place in digital humanities or digital scholarship centers; other times in libraries and museums; some are recurring, and others, ad hoc. The chapters in this volume are written to appeal to the same broad audiences as the workshops themselves: to students, teachers, administrators, novices, and experts alike.