The Advancing Digital Health Humanities Institute

What is digital health humanities?

Digital health humanities is an emerging, interdisciplinary field that leverages digital methods and tools to critically analyze health sciences materials in the pursuit of humanistic research. This research community provides unique methodological and theoretical approaches to contemporary exigencies regarding access, ethics, and discrimination in our health systems. It does this by entwining the digital humanities’ critical use and reappraisal of emerging digital technologies with the health humanities’ interest in health, wellness, and equity in care. Digital health humanities research uses computational methods, digital platforms, and the critical design of unique digital tools to pursue research questions around the human experience of health, illness, ability, and cultures of care.

Digital health humanities is an allied discipline to the digital humanities, using the same methods to address problems in health and healthcare. Described as a “big tent”, the digital humanities is unified by the 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. Most of these digital projects rely on data—including, but not limited to, numerical representations, text, images, metadata, and ethnographic interviews—and these projects use that data to ask questions, make arguments, or produce new research objects.

For further readings, see our Zotero collection of digital humanities and digital health humanities readings.