What is digital health humanities?
Digital health humanities is an emerging academic domain that leverages digital methods and tools to analyze health sciences materials for humanistic research. This field is an allied discipline to the digital humanities, using the field’s methods to address problems in health and healthcare. Described as a “big tent,” the digital humanities are unified through their use of digital and computational tools, but not by any specific method. Digital humanists make digital maps, create digital artworks, analyze textual data, collect web scrapings, critique code, and design new digital tools. Projects in the field are often collaborative, take years to complete, and follow an open scholarship publishing model.
Most digital health humanities projects use data in some capacity. This data is used to reassess how human subjects are treated in digital health contexts. Kirsten Ostherr, PhD, MPH argues that the field provides “the integration of situated critique, historical contextualization, and human-centered design” to counter over technologized approaches to health and wellness.
Digital health humanities at UCSF
Digital health humanities research at UCSF uses digital tools to analyze historical and archival materials in medicine, health, and wellness. UCSF Archives and Special Collections has prepared several of its collections for digital health humanities use through its Archives as Data initiative (see below). UCSF has access to other digital information repositories, including HathiTrust, the HathiTrust Research Center, and Calisphere.
The Digital Health Humanities Program, established in 2023, provides research assistance for any research project involving digital methods. This program also onboards scholars who are new to the field so they may learn about unique digital tools and approaches. Interested scholars can learn about or access assistance to the following tools and methods:
- Text analysis, topic modelling, and sentiment analysis (Voyant, AntConc, Mallet)
- GIS mapping (ArcGIS, QGIS)
- Network analysis (Gephi, Net.Create)
- Digital arts-based research
- Digital archive creation (Collection Builder, Mukurtu)
- Digital publishing (Scalar)
Meet our digital health humanities expert
Sean is the digital health humanities program coordinator. He is a digital humanist who works between the history of medicine, media studies, and postcolonial theory. Sean’s work grapples with the ethics around the creation and maintenance of medical collections.
Digital health humanities workshops and learning programs
The Digital Health Humanities program offers introductory workshops to cover technical and conceptual gaps in doing digital and humanities research on health related subjects. These workshops cover gaps in knowledge necessary to do research, but which are often taken for granted when introducing new methods, protocols, or approaches.
The Digital Health Humanities Program runs quarterly introductions on these topics:
- Navigating and Using the Command Line on PCs and Macs
- Using Microsoft Excel for Qualitative Research
- GitHub Pages
The Digital Health Humanities Program also runs the following workshops on a semi-regular basis:
- Introduction to the Digital Health Humanities
- Low Code Approaches to Digital Research
These workshops are free to attend, and are open to UCSF students, faculty and staff.
Digital health humanities community initiative
The Digital Health Humanities Program in the UCSF Archives and Special Collections is beginning a new community initiative, to support qualitative and humanistic research across UCSF. This participant driven program offers research support through its three main programs:
- A bi-weekly online working and writing accountability group
- Transformative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences Reading Group: an online reading group focusing on emerging methods developed by scholars of difference.
- One on One Research Consultations: These consultations can help scholars trying to narrow research questions, learn new analytical methods, or develop new research projects.
Participants in these programs will benefit from and engage with the emerging digital health humanities community at UCSF. They will also have the opportunity to give input and develop further events and programs associated with the Digital Health Humanities Community Initiative.
Archives as Data research guide
“Archives as Data” refers to archival collection materials in digital form that can be shared, accessed, analyzed, and referenced as data. Using digital methods, researchers can work with data repositories to explore and evaluate collection materials and analyze trends and connections within and across them. UCSF Archives and Special Collections provides access to several digitized health sciences collections as data.
In collaboration with subject matter and technical experts, the provides programming and learning resources to encourage and develop researcher capabilities using data science techniques to analyze archival materials and archival datasets.
The Archives as Data research guide is a centralized resource for researchers and contains descriptions of datasets that have been prepared from archival collections, including the following:
Researchers will also find information on accessing and using archives as data, and links to learning resources about various data analysis methods in the research guide.
Online learning resources
The open-source Digital Health Humanities course on the UCSF Collaborative Learning Environment makes resources and recordings from digital health humanities classes and workshops available online. Recordings include digital health humanities overview sessions, approaches to finding and exploring archives as data, and walkthroughs from collaborative workshops with the UCSF Library Data Science and Open Scholarship team.
Additionally, the Data Science Education and Training Portal is an extensive information hub for data science learning resources for the UCSF community.
A digital health humanities reading list is accessible through a public Zotero library. The cited articles in this library introduce new scholars to the health humanities, the digital humanities, and digital approaches to health research. Digital health humanities research examples can be found within the first and second issues of Reviews in Digital Health Humanities’ special issues on race, health and medicine.
The No More Silence initiative is a significant, foundational precursor to digital health humanities programming at UCSF. Outcomes of this initiative include direct computational access to historical data from the San Francisco Bay Area’s response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as well as documentation from a series of workshops hosted by Archives and Special Collections. Researchers can access free code and other resources from these workshops for independent exploration.
The Advancing Digital Health Humanities Institute
The UCSF Archives and Special Collections hosted a digital health humanities research incubator starting in September, 2024. Funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities’ Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, this program onboarded health humanists and digital humanists to methods, approaches, and materials for research into health, wellness, and systems of care.
Learn more to about the Advancing Digital Health Humanities Institute.
Contact us
Contact us with any inquiries about digital health humanities programming and resources or to request project consultation.