In preparing to complete this assigned blog, I found myself stuck on an infuriatingly simple question:
What is a blog?
I could only really come up with two examples of blogs that I engage with. Those are food blogs and Tumblr. Tumblr is more of a social platform to my mind, and Food blogs are more relevant, but are infuriating slogs separating me from the recipe I was trying to look up. I didn’t feel that needing someone’s life story to access a quick ingredient substitution was a good frame of reference. So, I looked up academic blogs instead. I found these two videos to be the most helpful:
How to Start a Blog in 2025 with no Experience – Start a Blog Step By Step by Diary Reverie on YouTube, and What is an Academic Blog? By Navigating Academia, also on YouTube, to be the best references.
After watching these videos, I decided that for each blog due I would make myself a checklist with the course-relevant requirements. Following the requirements, I decided to chronicle my thought process and engagement with the material, as well as how I associated it with prior experience.
I began with more tediously simple questions. The first of which was: What else do I write? I don’t have an active social media presence, but I do engage in creative writing. A simple enough place to start, though I probably should have tried to circle my thought process back towards my academic writing. Instead, I remembered The Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, Omnibus Collection, an anthology edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The author of The Guide, Douglas Adams (March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001), has a talent for making an intensely unusual setting feel normal, giving the reader enough trust in the narrator’s authority to simply accept as fact the insanity that is the universe of The Guide.
So creative writing can sound authoritative, but could non-fiction sound so engaging? In yet another mental tangent, I recalled the work of my favorite anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960). She worked on several stage plays, stories, and recorded songs, meant to both document her studies and express them in a way that felt fictionalized.1
This, along with wholly fictional but research-inspired works, allowed many white Americans to interact with black culture in a way that was non-threatening and removed from social taboos.2
Considering Hurston’s writing, I returned to an observation I had made in our small groups in class. I did not, unfortunately, share this in the wider group. Huzzah for social anxiety. My observation throughout the readings and class was that, for myself, I was more comfortably able to associate Digital Humanities with my background in Anthropology than in Art History. To return to a simple question:
What is Anthropology?
Anthropology is an umbrella term that covers multiple fields within it, such as linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and the one you have probably heard of before, archaeology. Anthropology is also an elevator pitch. If an archaeologist were in an elevator with only 30 seconds to describe their work, it would be as an Anthropologist. This is because anthropology is interdisciplinary by necessity. Being able to exhume an ancient grave and identify the age, sex, and condition of the bones takes an incredible amount of expertise. Reading the language inscribed on the grave marker is likely the job of someone else entirely. Consider how most reputable ancient history documentaries interview experts in niche fields. Just as many unique disciplines, if not more, are involved with any anthropological publication.
This is, to me, the most relatable connection to Adam Crymble’s explanation of Digital Humanities in the introduction to his 2021 book Technology and the Historian.3 To summarize Crymble’s explanation, Digital Humanities is an umbrella term used to cover a wide range of disciplines, processes, and outcomes. It has meant different things to different people; it has sparked controversy and confusion, and has become something more than a definition. Like using Anthropology as an elevator-pitch term to describe one’s own work, a Digital Humanist has to use the rest of those 29 seconds to specify their interests and contributions.
I have, of course, also been referencing the 2009 article What is Digital History?4 throughout this post. In their view, Digital History is an interdisciplinary approach to history which puts the digital age at the forefront. This means that research materials are increasingly available online, as are the results of research. In the years after this article was published, this has evolved into “gamifying” and adapting history to be engaging and interactive for younger audiences. These audiences are, in many cases, entirely unfamiliar with the concept of being unable to access a book because it is located in a different library, and very familiar with short-form, gratifying content. Though Seefeldt and Thomas were unable to anticipate the entrenchment of social media in our daily lives, Crymble witnessed this as he wrote his book. Unfortunately, there is very little consideration of the matter in the final publication.5
Finally, I found that both the article and book missed an important detail in the permeation of the digital into society; not everyone knows everything. Crymble cites regional differences in the digital experience, but does not touch on individual thought processes. It is simply assumed that anyone of a certain age has enough experience with internet culture to, for instance, know what a blog is and how to write one. This oversight is also seen in schools, where typing lessons that I myself benefited from have been removed. It is even in game development, where developers have found that younger audiences are unfamiliar with typing skills and even traditional gaming controllers. If everything is expected to be on a touchscreen, then what can be accessed on that screen has to change. The definitions and applications of Digital Humanities must be expected to change. Digital History, then, is a descriptor of an ever-evolving interdisciplinary effort with the goal of making history accessible and engaging across the globe.
References
- See for example: Zora Hurston sings and performs “The Crow Dance” and Zora Neale Hurston ’28 Sings: “Halihmuhfack”
↩︎ - A recommended short story by Husrton: Hurston, Zora Neale. “Sweat.” Fire!! 1926, Digital Copy Accessible on Biblioklept.org edition. https://biblioklept.org/2013/01/21/sweat-zora-neale-hurston/ ↩︎
- Crymble, Adam. Technology and the Historian. Paperback. 1st Edition. Vol. 1. University of Illinois Press, 2021. ↩︎
- Seefeldt, Douglas, and William G. Thomas. “What is Digital History?” Perspectives on History, May 1, 2009. https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/what-is-digital-history-may-2009/. ↩︎
- For further review of unaddressed matters, see: Lewandoski, Julia. Review of Technology and the Historian. Crymble, Adam. University of Illinois Press, 2021. From H-Sci-Med-Tech (May, 2022) https://networks.h-net.org/node/9782/reviews/10217064/lewandoski-crymble-technology-and-historian-transformations-digital ↩︎