Digital Environmental Humanities

Abstract

Over the last half century, the environmental humanities has become a newinterdisciplinary and digitally engaged field with unique public impact and participa-tion. Its fields include older disciplines such as history, literature, and geography andnewer interdisciplinary subdisciplines such as public history, science and technologystudies, environmental history, and ecocriticism. Many of these scholars were earlyadopters of digital research practices from Geographic Information Systems to digitalphotography, and as a small interdisciplinary field with global scope it benefitted fromdigital communications and networking. In the early age of environmental humanitiesresearch communication media changed relatively slowly, but now as they evolvemore rapidly than the schools of thought theyhelp disseminate, the digital media argu-ably influence and disrupt the fields themselves. Digital environmental humanitiesspaces shifted from being sites primarily ofscholarly conversation into ones that weremore publicly engaged, and over time non-academics have shaped the fields throughdigital participation as well. Through several waves of research and communicationtechnologies, the turn toward public and digital humanities has transformed how weencounter the natural environment and how we define the field.