Hi Matt,

I work in the Technology & Digital Scholarship department of Florida State
University Libraries, and I spent my first few months trying to come up
answers to those exact questions. Here's what I came up with:

Digital humanities is the act of doing humanities scholarship using
research methods enabled by new technology. The archetypical digital
humanities project in my mind is text mining. If you are coming up with
humanities "data" and using data analysis tools on it, you are probably
doing DH work (IMHO).

Digital scholarship is the idea of DH, but extended outside of DH to all
scholarship. How does new technology affect scholarship in psychology?
biochemistry? law? A big problem that I see with "digital scholarship" is
that I have yet to hear anyone outside of libraries or DH communities use
it. The humanities havent always been so digital, so the term "Digital
Humanities" is a semi-useful term to differentiate this specific form of
research from more "traditional" methods. The "digital" prefix has less
utility outside of humanities; science has always been pretty digital out
of necessity and other fields have adopted digital methods as they go. I've
heard librarians use the term e-science sometimes, and it reminds me of the
term "e-business" back in the 90's but now almost all business is
e-business so the term no longer makes much sense. Most scholarship these
days is digital, which makes defining digital scholarship as something
special a bit difficult.

In our department we use digital scholarship to refer to parts of the
scholarship process that are more technology-oriented where faculty might
not be aware of general best practices. Data management, research metadata,
altmetrics, web publishing and licensing are some areas that we try to
focus on supporting faculty. We aren't a huge department and we're learning
as we go, so discussing what digital scholarship means and how we can
provide value to faculty members is a big point of discussion (although I'm
sure we all have our own definitions and ideas).

Just one person's opinion, I hope that doesn't confuse things further.
-Bryan Brown

On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 2:13 PM, Natalie Meyers <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> this title may be of interest :
> Defining Digital Humanities A Reader Edited by Melissa Terras, Julianne
> Nyhan and Edward Vanhoutte December 2013  978-1-4094-6963-6 $44.95
>
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Matt Sherman <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > This is a bit more philosophical question which might only apply to a few
> > people but I am trying to work out some definitions for my own
> > edification.  So for those in the digital scholarship and digital
> > humanities subset I would be interested in getting some thoughts on these
> > three questions:
> >
> > 1) How would you define digital scholarship?
> >
> > 2) How would you define digital humanities?
> >
> > 3) Are they the same thing and why or why not?
> >
> > Any thoughts are appreciated as I am trying to think through this myself.
> >
> > Matt Sherman
> >
>
>
>
> --
> *Natalie K. Meyers*
>
> *E-Research & VecNet Digital Librarian*
>
> *Hesburgh Libraries*
>
> *University of Notre Dame*
> 1136A Hesburgh Library
> Notre Dame, IN 46556
> *o:* 574-631-1546
> *f:* 574-631-6772
> *e: *[log in to unmask]
>
> <http://library.nd.edu/>
>