Digital Humanities as Theory and Practice

Abstract

In his recent text on the meaning of the digital humanities, Liu (2013, p. 409) argued that an ethnographer of this field “might take a page from Claude Lévi-Strauss and chart the current digital humanities as something like a grid of affiliations and differences between neighboring tribes”. Indeed, complex social grids and seemingly fuzzy practices—analogous to those in contemporary digital humanities—constitute the ethnographer’s epistemic atelier in which different forms and norms of social behavior coalesce in an articulated arrangement. The articulation emerges through narratives of the fieldwork data and the ethnographer’s metanarrative of these empirical accounts.