What is this thing we call digital humanities?

The question of the evening is this: what is this thing we call "digital humanities?" We know the definition of "digital," and have long debated the definition of "humanities" in English classes (and may or may not have a good grasp on that one still), but when the words are put together, something new is created. And this something new is, at least to me, slightly puzzling.  But, from the knowledge I have gained from reading the three NY Times articles by Patricia Cohen and from our class discussion on August 28, I have formulated my own definition of the "digital humanities."  Digital humanities are (go ahead, you can quote me on this): the acceleration of the study of the humanities (i.e. literature, history) with the aid of new digital technologies.

The acceleration of the study of the humanities through these new digitized methods does not occur in just one way, so it can not be pinned down as one, single practice.  Instead, as Cohen mentions in her articles, it can occur through the use of statistics, crowd-sourcing, and digital maps to recreate, restudy, and realize different factions of the humanities.  Cohen references the Bentham Project as one such example of recreating, restudying, and realizing literature through crowd-sourcing, where it is an open offer to the public to transcribe Bentham's unpublished manuscripts. By sharing these manuscripts digitally, University College London (which has spearheaded this project) creates an opportunity for the public to read and work with literature which would not otherwise be available to them and accelerates the process of transcription, which will in turn help scholars to study and discover ideas within the manuscripts much sooner than would have been otherwise possible.

The idea behind the Bentham Project is the same which forms the backbone of our project with digital humanities, where we will be poring over pages of Thoreau's manuscripts of Walden. This example of crowd-sourcing is just one of many ways digital humanities is allowing the traditional method of studying the humanities meet technology, and therefore be quickened, expanded, and evolved.