Working with Digital Humanities

As an explicitly transdisciplinary idea, digital humanities provides opportunities to bring together people and interests across the sectors, from a variety of scholarly and practical disciplines, and from the society at large. It may not be crucial that everyone has an identical understanding what digital humanities is if the stakeholders have shared or compatible concerns, and practical respect each others priorities. This applies to research questions and practical interests as well as their projected significance. The compatibility of concerns and mutual understanding of each others priorities is not, however, something that would be given in a collaboration or dependency relation that crosses different disciplines and sectors. To give a few examples, problems may occur when developing and borrowing digital tools from across contexts to address research questions from the humanities disciplines, when the limits of digital approaches to address specific questions are negotiated within and between contexts, and increasingly, when digital humanities researchers are using data provided by and originally produced in other sectors and situations. Even if the digital humanities literature in general and, to a verying degree, individual research projects have emphasised the importance of being critical and sensitive to the implications of using borrowed and newly developed technologies and understanding the data, so far, there is relatively little empirical research on the implications of cross-sectoral collaborations.