After seeing how scholars have attempted to define and scope the term “Digital Humanities” over a course of a few decades, I will attempt my own definition based on the elements that I find most convincing:

Digital Humanities is a field of study centered on the development, use, and critical examination of computer-based tools and methods that expand the possibilities for interdisciplinary, humanistic inquiry. The goals of digital humanities scholarship are to digitally preserve the past and its cultural artifacts, increase access to knowledge, foster collaboration among scholars and with the public, and disrupt traditional barriers to academic publishing.

There are a few important features to note about this definition. First, I refer to Digital Humanities as a field of study, not simply a methodology or technique. This distinguishes my definition from early definitions, excerpted in Activity 2.2, that are mostly concerned with digital archiving of physical material as a supplement to traditional print scholarship. Instead, I believe Digital Humanities, as of 2026, has moved far beyond this notion to include theoretical frameworks and scholarly debate over issues and practices.

Second, as a field that has grown and matured over a period of 25+ years, I feel it’s important to state some (mostly) agreed upon goals of Digital Humanities. The fact that the field of Digital Humanities does have some explicit goals is representative of a move past the experimentation and defining phase of its development as a discipline. While there were certainly some more revolutionary goals described in a few activity excerpts as well as the Fiormonte, Ricaurte, and Chaudhuri reading, I decided to limit this portion of the definition to endeavors which I felt represented a common theme across definitions post-2010.

Lastly, I’ll simply add that my definition above attempts to strike a balance between inclusivity and clarity. This is a tension that existed in many of the more recent definitions of Digital Humanities – some definitions were so expansive that they almost become meaningless. For example, I did not find Rafel Alvarado’s definition (“The digital humanities is what digital humanists do…” [Activity 2.2]) to be particularly helpful for a new person who may be exploring this field of study for the first time.