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An Introduction to Digital Scholarship

A library guide to methodologies and tools of digital scholarship across disciplines.

This library guide is your starting point to explore the wide-ranging world of digital scholarship. I invite you to discover and explore methods, resources, and projects that may enrich your own learning, teaching, and approach to research.

What is Digital Scholarship?

Digital scholarship is a broad term that, perhaps, can best be described by identifying certain hallmarks that qualify a practice or work as such. Digital scholarship is scholarly activity that makes significant use of new digital tools and methods to advance a scholarly argument, provide a pedagogical thrust, offer interpretation, be collaborative, be interdisciplinary, be (ideally) open access, and/or be reusable, downloadable, manipulable, or transformable. Not all digital scholarship is all these things at once. Examples include works that are born digital, multimedia, database technology-based, analysis of other born-digital material, digital text and images, digital music or art, and data sets. Some digital scholarship is public-facing but much is never intended to be formally published. This form of scholarly data, presentations, and dissemination represents a shift  from traditional publishing and the kind of scholarship generally collected and preserved in libraries. It is a  natural evolution and adaptation of digital technology to scholarship. One last way to view digital scholarship is, if it can be easily done in print, it probably is not digital scholarship.

Questions about Digital Scholarship?

The goal of DH Answers is to create a friendly and inviting space where people can help each other with questions about languages, tools, standards, best practices, pedagogy, and all things related to scholarly activity in the digital humanities (broadly defined).

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.