Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"Who's In and Who's Out?"
Digital Humanities is about building things. I'm willing to entertain highly expansive definitions of what it means to build something. I also think the discipline includes and should include people who theorize about building, people who design so that others might build, and those who supervise building (the coding question is, for me, a canard, insofar as many people build without knowing how to program). I'd even include people who are working to rebuild systems like our present, irretrievably broken system of scholarly publishing. But if you are not making anything, you are not—in my less-than-three-minute opinion—a digital humanist.
Stephen Ramsay's definition of Digital Humanities is pretty famous. He's saying that Digital Humanities is all about "building," though he's open about what building means exactly.
Basically, according to Ramsay, digital Humanists are builders: they don't just "research" things; they make things. Some may be computer programmers, and in that case they'll build programs that help us do research in a more effective way. Some may not know how to program, and in that case they may "build" other things, like new ways of publishing.
Ramsay's addressing a big question among Digital Humanities: do you have to know how to code if you want to be considered legit? Ramsay says no: for him, it's just necessary to build something.
Quote :"On Building"
But to me, there's always been a profound—and profoundly exciting and enabling—commonality to everyone who finds their way to dh [digital humanities]. And that commonality, I think, involves moving from reading and critiquing to building and making.
"Build," though, casts a wider net… All the technai of Digital Humanities—data mining, xml encoding, text analysis, gis, Web design, visualization, programming, tool design, database design, etc—involve building; only a few of them require programming, per se.
The stuff that we usually associate with Digital Humanities—stuff like data mining, text analysis, and web design etc.—all involves building. But not all of this stuff involves programming; Ramsay's saying that that you can be a builder without necessarily having to be a programmer.
For example, as a Digital Humanist, you could come up with a concept for a website, and a computer programmer could then go ahead and execute it for you. Ramsay's idea is that even if you just come up with the concept, you're still building something, same as the computer programmer who actually creates the website for you based on your concept.