Use this guide to learn more about key digital humanities concepts, methods, and resources at Yale.

If you want advice at any stage of a digital humanities project, you can book a consultation with staff at the DHLab.

"Digital Humanities" has many definitions. These can include the use of technology to support humanities projects, the use of humanities skills and lenses to analyze technology subjects, and the use by anyone in any discipline of methods often used by digital humanists.

This guide is non-exhaustive, and intended to help with some frequently used techniques, concepts, and tools. If you need help with your project and aren't sure if it counts as digital humanities, reach out—we can always pass you along to our library colleagues if they're better positioned to help.

No matter your digital humanities project, there are a few things to keep in mind. These include:

Goal or Purpose

• Why are you making your project? This could be a topic you want to explore, a tool you want to try out, or an audience you want to reach: how can you fulfill this best (and most easily)?

Audience or Users

• Who are you making this project for, if it's outward-facing? Is it other scholars in your subfield? French-speaking retirees with college degrees? High-school readers of Jane Austen in the United States? Someone else?
• How will your project reach your audience? If you're not included in your audience, have you spoken with people who are? Is this an audience you should be addressing?

Sustainability

• Many digital humanities projects are envisioned as permanent web projects, indefinitely available: this requires the ongoing cost of web hosting, maintenance of changing or outdated code or features, and sometimes even complete rebuilding if a technology becomes obsolete or a tool is discontinued
• What do you want out of your project? If it's for a portfolio or CV, could you document your project in video, pictures, and other more easily maintained media rather than hosting it indefinitely? If it's for permanent public use, could you imagine the project starting from its most portable elements (a simple data file, for example) so you have something to distribute if other elements stop working?

Feasibility

• What will you need to complete your project? If there are comparable projects available, what did they need? Are there skills, periods of time, funding sources, or teammates you should plan for or secure ahead of time?
• Does the technique or platform you've chosen do what you want it to do? Will it give you rigorous results for the question you're framing, or offer the features you're hoping to offer?
• Is there an easier way to meet your goal and reach the audience you want to reach?

Try our fun visualizer to get a jump start on matching your goals to tools and techniques:

I want it to be...