Towards a Conceptual Framework for the Digital Humanities

For roughly a decade (1998-2007) I led new directions activities at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute across the domain of computing and its interactions with engineering, medicine, business, and the arts & sciences. Reflections on this extended multidisciplinary experience have led to the articulation of a new perspective on the nature and structure of computing as a scientific discipline (Rosenbloom, 2004, 2009, 2010, 2012; Denning and Rosenbloom, 2009). In the process has come: a new conception of what a great scientific domain is; the realization that computing forms the fourth such domain, with the physical, life and social sciences comprising the other three domains; the recognition that much of the core content and future of computing is inherently multidisciplinary; the understanding that this multidisciplinarity can be reduced to a small fixed set of across-domain relationships, defining the relational architecture; the demonstration that the relational architecture yields a novel organizational framework over computing; and the application of this framework to illuminating some of the connections between computing and other scientific disciplines. It has also suggested several tentative conclusions concerning disciplines outside of computing, such as that mathematics and the humanities can both be considered as part of the scientific enterprise, but that neither amounts to a great scientific domain on its own. Mathematics instead nestles naturally within a broad understanding of the computing domain, while the humanities fit within a comparably broad understanding of the social domain. The purpose of this article is to further explore these notions with respect to the emerging area of the digital humanities, with their focus on the interchange between computing and the humanities. In particular, we will look at the idea that the humanities can be viewed as a part of science – in fact, as part of the social domain – and at the framework that this yields for understanding the space of relationships between computing and the humanities. Such an exploration requires some understanding of computing, the humanities, and the philosophy of science. I am a professional within the first of these, but no more than an interested amateur with respect to the latter two. So there are inherent risks in this enterprise, but the hope is that the utility of its results will overbalance any naivete exposed in the process.