What is Digital Humanities

First Definition:  Teaching and learning that take place using technology.  

Second Definition:  Research, teaching and learning that take place using technology.

Not a lot of difference between the two, I grant you, but a deeper synthesis exists in the second than the first. 

While I found the entire class discussion thought-provoking, the piece I most related to was Jones’ idea of eversion, the notion that this alternate reality we call cyberworld or cyberspace is leaking into everything in our world, that machines and humans are combining to produce some sort of postmodern reality and that DH is a crystallized form of that transformation.      

I tend to perceive reality as circles within circles, systems moving within systems, so the idea of DH as an expression of a larger process makes complete sense to me.  While Kuhn’s writings in the early 60s confined the term paradigm shift to a scientific context, I happen to think that Jones is right – we are in the throes of one conceptual worldview being replaced by another – which to my mind amounts to a paradigm shift.  The cybernetic metaphor that began reshaping our social values and environment in the 50s has now become the paradigm shift of the 21st century, within which exists collaborative practice and spirit of community on one side of the equation, and alienation, dehumanization and a means of revolt against the dominant hierarchies on the other.   We’re living in interesting times.