Digital Humanities: Concepts, Tools and Applications

Digital humanities is a result of the convergence of digital technology with social sciences and humanities. It is one of the key research areas around the world by the library and information science profession, and in cognate areas such as art and archeology. Focus groups, digital humanities centres are created for intensive researches which are located mainly in libraries as their core programmes. The library techniques and methods such as knowledge organisation, knowledge management, search and retrieval design, education, and emerging areas such as metadata, semantic mapping, ontology, thesaurus construction, digital curation, discovery services, find application in digital humanities. A new area of study, historical informatics complements the digital humanities. India has vast potential application of digital humanities with its diverse culture, customs and languages and so on. India is reckoned as one of the advanced countries in the IT sector, hence recognising the socio-cultural legacy and diverse historical background, it is viewed that digital humanities has many opportunities and applications for LIS professionals in India to contribute substantially. This paper brings together the concepts, tools, and applications of digital humanities and proposes a course of study in LIS curriculum.