Introduction to Digital Humanities

As someone who likes to write, I have always heard the phrase “you learn a lot about the author from their works”, not because they put themselves as a character in the text (though some do), but because everything they write has a piece of them attached to it. They have their own flair, their own identity woven into the sentences. And so the fact that, as described in “Introduction” by Ben Blatt, two statisticians were able to find out the authorship due to the variance of different words used by the two proposed authors makes a lot of sense. Of course, they would have different writing styles that would be more or less consistent, regardless of the subject matter. They are different people. The fact that technology makes it so much easier to make this an option is where things get more digital humanistic. The opportunity to ask more questions about the work, and have the realistic and appropriate means to answer them, is a part of the digital humanities that I absolutely adore. As Blatt states perfectly, “The research won’t be painfully complex. It doesn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be, in order to be worthwhile”(7). This opportunity to use technology to ask and answer questions, while it can solve generations of head-scratching, can also just find something interesting to bring up in casual conversation. There is so much that can be questioned with this new resource of problem-solving. The opportunity for more intrigue and expanding the horizon of more humanistic pursuits with classically STEM methods of deduction is exactly what we need in the world. Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash