Digital Humanities as Cultural Resistance

By Noel Galon de Leon

On February 28, I had the honor of being one of the invited speakers at Tech-Know-Kasyon 2025, an annual public service event organized by the Division of Professional Education and UP High School in Iloilo at UP Visayas. The event brought together nearly 100 teachers from various DepEd schools across Iloilo. In my talk, I discussed the emergence and ongoing development of Digital Humanities, examining its interconnected themes and its potential to contribute to the growth of local literature in Western Visayas.

According to early scholars such as Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Digital Humanities is a “community of practice” where technology serves as a catalyst for expanding the scope of traditional humanities, particularly in research and knowledge dissemination. Meanwhile, Matthew K. Gold argues that Digital Humanities is not merely a set of digital tools but a distinct intellectual space that interrogates and produces humanistic knowledge through computational methods and digital media.

In the Philippine context, the significance of Digital Humanities extends beyond mere digitization; it offers a profound reimagining of how we document, interpret, and engage with local literature, history, and the arts. Digital archives become more than repositories of information, they function as dynamic spaces for cultural memory, democratizing access to texts and artifacts that have long been confined to academic institutions and private collections. Furthermore, the digital sphere enables storytelling innovations, immersive virtual exhibits, and the systematic documentation of indigenous and regional traditions, ensuring that cultural narratives, particularly those marginalized by dominant historical frameworks, are not only preserved but actively reclaimed.

Tara McPherson takes this discourse further by emphasizing how Digital Humanities interrogates the very ways in which technology reshapes narrative structures, epistemological frameworks, and our collective historical consciousness. The digital realm is not a neutral space; it reconfigures power dynamics in knowledge production, challenging hierarchies in authorship, authority, and accessibility. In a country where historical revisionism and cultural erasures persist, Digital Humanities emerges as both an intellectual movement and a form of cultural resistance, one that insists on the visibility of local histories and artistic expressions.

Within the Philippines, the role of Digital Humanities is particularly urgent. Digital Archiving is no longer just a matter of preservation but an assertion of cultural sovereignty, as seen in the efforts of the National Library of the Philippines and grassroots digitization initiatives that seek to safeguard local manuscripts, folk traditions, and endangered languages. Online Accessibility disrupts traditional gatekeeping in the arts and academia by allowing wider audiences to engage with Philippine cultural productions through digital platforms, e-books, virtual museums, and interactive historical timelines. Meanwhile, Interactive Engagement harnesses the potential of virtual reality experiences, gamified cultural education, and transmedia storytelling, ensuring that Philippine arts and heritage do not merely survive in static archives but thrive in dynamic, participatory spaces that resonate with contemporary audiences, particularly the youth.

Digital Humanities, therefore, is not merely a field of study, it is a cultural imperative. It demands that we rethink the ways in which Philippine history, literature, and artistic heritage are curated, contested, and communicated in the digital age. More than a bridge between technology and the humanities, it is a battleground for cultural memory, an intervention against erasure, and a call to reclaim narratives that define our national and regional identities.

Why Digital Humanities?

As a researcher and scholar of literature, particularly in Western Visayas, I have observed that the role of print as a medium for publication has become increasingly limited in the contemporary period. This is especially evident when it comes to publishing anthologies of creative works or educational journals, such as those focusing on science and culture.

What do I mean by the limitations of print in the present era? If we examine the context of well-established and credible digital humanities platforms—such as the Digital Third Space at UP Diliman, Digital Humanities Quarterly, The Programming Historian, Europeana Collections, Digital Public Library of America, and The World Digital Library—we can see that print and traditional publishing are lagging behind the rapid advancements in digital publishing. Digital platforms impose fewer restrictions on the volume and types of materials that can be included in a journal or publication.

For instance, a music educator researching a traditional song will typically find that only the song’s lyrics can be published in a print journal. In contrast, digital humanities allow for the inclusion of an audio recording, enabling readers to hear the actual melody rather than merely reading the lyrics. Another example is film analysis or art criticism. In print publications, readers are limited to textual descriptions, as films cannot be embedded in physical journals. However, in digital humanities, researchers may include a teaser or selected scenes, provided that permission is granted, offering a richer and more immersive analytical experience. Similarly, in art criticism, instead of a black-and-white reproduction of a painting, a high-resolution image can be integrated, allowing viewers to zoom in and examine intricate details, something that traditional print publishing in magazines or newspapers cannot accommodate.

These are just some of the possibilities that digital humanities offer. The field presents a wealth of opportunities for exploration and innovation. It is, therefore, imperative that we recognize the advancements in technology and harness them meaningfully to facilitate the effective dissemination and preservation of local knowledge. This is particularly relevant for the traditional literary forms of Panay, which are predominantly oral, auditory, and performative in nature. Given these characteristics, digital humanities are highly suited to our literary traditions, as they go beyond the printed word to encompass sound, movement, and performance as integral aspects of literary texts. In this context, digital platforms become more appropriate, as they allow for the inclusion of not only the written form of our literature but also its actual recitation, musical elements, and performance gestures. In this way, we do not merely document our literary heritage; we transmit it in a vibrant and dynamic form that remains faithful to its original tradition.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in both the Division of Professional Education and U.P. High School in Iloilo. He serves as an Executive Council Member of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.