Making and interpreting: digital humanities as embodied action

The paper situates Digital Humanities (DH) within contemporary interdisciplinary trends and longstanding debates about its definition and scope. It argues that while digital technologies have energized humanities research, the enduring humanistic problem concerns cultivating sensitivity and proportion in understanding human experience. The authors introduce a core thesis: DH practice should be understood as embodied action in which bodily interactions with digital technologies—across actual and virtual spaces—co-produce knowledge. Technologies are not neutral; they shape decisions such as inclusion/exclusion of data and mediate haptic and cultural constraints on the sociological body. The paper proposes rethinking DH via situatedness and embodiment, treating DH practice as a dynamic, bodily inclusive event that produces 'digitised' knowledge and anticipates a prospective DH 3.0 aligned with humanities’ core values.

The review revisits the humanities’ core value of criticalness and warns that excessive reliance on quantification can weaken critical awareness, as numerical indicators can inadequately capture subjective sensibility. It traces the move from Lippmann’s media-constructed 'pseudo-environment' to contemporary virtual environments (VR/AR/MR) that produce new bodily experiences and reframe authenticity. A historical overview of DH charts its origins in humanities computing (e.g., Busa’s indexing project), early statistical authorship studies, and the first wave emphasizing digitization, large corpora, and distant reading. The second wave (DH 2.0) is characterized as qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, and generative—harnessing digital tools for complexity, medium specificity, historical context, critique, and interpretation. Three strands of DH 2.0 scholarship are highlighted: (1) engagements with cultural and justice-oriented issues (antiracism, feminism, Black studies, LGBTQ+), using digital technologies as part of the cultural environment; (2) minimal computing/digital minimalism that centers cultural practice and access while questioning technological escalation; and (3) situated research practices in DH labs/centers, where laboratory structures and cultures shape knowledge, with calls to foreground the presence of culturally and historically embodied bodies in these spaces. This sets up the authors’ move to a bodily inclusive lens that emphasizes embodied movement, haptic experience, and situatedness in DH practice.

The study is a conceptual and analytical inquiry that builds on prior theoretical work on embodiment, bodily movement, and actual/virtual space. Using the sociological body as a lens—understood as historically inherited and culturally embodied, shaped by institutional forces—the authors theorize DH practice as process-inclusive, where concrete bodily interactions with digital technologies are themselves critical and humanistic acts. Drawing from kinesics and haptic scholarship, they argue bodily movement and touch-based experience (including proprioception and kinaesthesia) contribute to knowledge-making in digital environments. The approach synthesizes literature on DH 1.0 and 2.0 and proposes a prospective DH 3.0 that foregrounds embodied, situated, and digitized forms of knowledge production. Two illustrative cases ground the analysis: (1) a digital fashion design practice that entangles traditional haptic skills with CAD/3D tools in mixed realities, and (2) a critical reflection on an online review analysis (Douban) showing how a bodily inclusive approach can address platform gatekeeping and researcher/user bodily interactions. No empirical datasets were generated; the method is theoretical-conceptual with case-based illustration.

• DH practice should be conceptualized as embodied action: bodily interactions with digital tools across actual and virtual spaces co-produce knowledge.
• Digital technologies are active contributors, not neutral media; knowledge produced with substantial technological involvement is 'digitised' knowledge.
• The characteristics of DH 2.0 (qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative) can be reinterpreted as concrete bodily actions situated in digital environments, anticipating a DH 3.0 centered on the digital lived encounter.
• Case 1 (digital fashion design): Traditional haptic knowledge (touch, material sensing) is re-mediated through visual-digital workflows (CLO3D, Cinema 4D, Adobe Substance 3D Painter, RIZOMUV), producing 'digitised' embodiment where visual cues invoke tactile memory and guide material decisions; technologies discipline and extend bodily capacities in mixed reality.
• Case 2 (online community research): Platform gatekeeping (e.g., pre-screened 1,500 comments from a much larger corpus) can misrepresent community attitudes; a bodily inclusive approach examines users’ and researchers’ situated bodily actions (reading, clicking, typing) and their socio-cultural differentiation to enrich interpretation beyond distant reading outputs.
• DH labs/centers are situated epistemic cultures where bodily movements, institutional structures, and practices co-construct knowledge; attention to embodied presence adds depth to analyses of lab cultures and knowledge transfer.

By reframing DH practice as embodied, situated action, the study addresses the research question of how digital technologies and bodies co-produce knowledge in the humanities. The findings show that the integration of bodily movement, haptic experience, and digital mediation reconceives DH as an event of making and interpreting rather than a tool-driven methodology. This restores humanistic criticalness by rendering visible the decision-laden, embodied processes through which data are selected, transformed, and interpreted. The digital fashion case concretizes how mixed realities generate 'digitised' embodiment, while the online review critique demonstrates how bodily inclusivity can mitigate interpretive blind spots stemming from platform gatekeeping and purely computational approaches. Overall, the paper advances a DH 3.0 paradigm that preserves core humanities values—attention to complexity, context, and interpretation—while embracing the constitutive role of technologies in shaping knowledge and experience.

The paper proposes a bodily inclusive paradigm for DH in which digital technologies and embodied actions co-make knowledge, yielding 'digitised' knowledge and new haptic understandings. DH thus transcends disciplinary boundaries to become a response of the humanities to the digital age, where bodily experience—shaped and partially formed by technology—guides knowledge production and perception of the world. In the anticipated DH 3.0, bodily actions in digital encounters actively co-produce knowledge rather than merely transmitting it, as digital technologies offer qualitatively new bodily experiences that transform how reality is realized and understood. Future work can deepen empirical studies of embodied interactions in DH labs, design practices, and online communities, and broaden perspectives beyond the regional focus acknowledged by the authors.

• Conceptual/theoretical study with illustrative cases; no empirical data were generated or analyzed.
• Authors acknowledge the article focuses on North American perspectives, with sources and references primarily from that context.
• Case illustrations (e.g., digital fashion design) may not be universally recognized as central to DH by all scholars, as noted by the authors.
• The second case critiques platform gatekeeping but does not conduct a full empirical reassessment; it outlines a pathway for bodily inclusive research rather than executing it.