The Digital Humanities approach attempts to pursue the mission of the traditional humanities, but admits the critical necessity for evolving intellectual skills in today’s context:
Even the most text-centric academic will admit the existence of visual rhetoric, but the skills to read interfaces, databases, and other content models are still very underdeveloped.
Humanities are traditionally dedicated to studying and interpreting texts. But what does it mean to “read” a text today, when its enunciation is so varied (written with complex software, disseminated through platforms which dynamics mutate constantly, consisted of additional layers which “encode” other meanings)?
For Digital Humanities, such skills enable at least the possibility of reading the underlying complexity of texts—such as software and lines of code responsible for structuring texts visually, programmatically, and intellectually, or the normative practices which seamlessly reproduce social and economic inequalities.