DQ and DH

Don Quixote in Digital Humanities: We know who Don Quixote is, but what is Digital Humanities?

Digital (adj): 

“using or characterized by computer technology” Merriam-Webster Dictionary

“Describes any system based on discontinuous data or events. Computers are digital machines because at their most basic level they can distinguish between just two values, 0 and 1, or off and on (…) In general, humans experience the world analogically. Vision, for example, is an analog experience because we perceive infinitely smooth gradations of shapes and colors. Most analog events, however, can be simulated digitally (…) Although digital representations are approximations of analog events, they are useful because they are relatively easy to store and manipulate electronically” Webopedia

Humanities (noun): 

“the study of how people process and document the human experience” Stanford Humanities Center

” academic disciplines that study human culture. The humanities use methods that are primarily critical, or speculative, and have a significant historical element” Wikipedia

Digital Humanities: 

” an area of research and teaching at the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Developing from the fields of humanities computing, humanistic computing,^[2] and digital humanities praxis (^[3]) digital humanities embraces a variety of topics, from curating online collections to data mining large cultural data sets. Digital humanities (often abbreviated DH) currently incorporates both digitized and born-digital materials and combines the methodologies from traditional humanities disciplines (such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology,music, and cultural studies) and social sciences ^[4] with tools provided by computing (such as data visualisation, information retrieval, data mining, statistics, text mining, digital mapping), and digital publishing. As well, related subfields of digital humanities have emerged like software studies, platform studies, and critical code studies. Digital Humanities also intersects with new media studies and information science as well as media theory of composition and game studies, particularly in areas related to digital humanities project design and production.” Wikipedia

Digital Humanities (DH) projects on Don Quixote (DQ) that our class found compelling:

The Don Quixote Collection, by Queen’s College of the City University of New York. It is an exhibition with information about the novel, its author Miguel de Cervantes, and the  13 editions of their collection dating from 1620 to 1933. You can view the editions and their metadata, an interactive geographic map of where and when they were produced, a visual catalog to help the viewer navigate the entire collection and see their relationships, a wiki page with more information about the collection, and an in-depth exhibition of the oldest 1620 edition of the novel. Our class especially liked the map that showed the history of the various editions and the places where they were produced.