An Interview with Yannick Rochat on Digital Humanities
The Annual Conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (#DH2015) – is currently taking place in Sydney, Australia from June 29 to July 3. Though Frontiers is not attending, we recently met with Yannick Rochat, postgraduate researcher of the EPFL Digital Humanities Lab who will be presenting on ‘Character Network Analysis of Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart’ on July 1, to discuss the current state of the field. His comments deliver an insightful look at what it means to study Digital Humanities today. Digital Humanities are here to stay. The field has, for a good half-century, been coming into its own, echoing a global need for new connections, new dialogues, and a new way of approaching the old. The old reshuffled. Refurbished. Reinstated. Interdisciplinarity is central to Digital Humanities. The field exhibits an interest in bridging traditionally holistic and hermetic disciplines. Openness and dialogue are key. Indeed, it would be impossible for one aspect of its bipartite structure to subsume the other (that the “digital” would consume and undo humanities, or the obverse: that humanities could “triumph” over the digital fad). The foundation of Digital Humanities is the necessity for dialogue. As the interview below shows, the field may be seen […]