Digital humanities is a rapidly developing interdisciplinary area on the border of the humanities and information technology, in creating and administrating humanities databases, presenting source references and research results, and conducting research. Various quantitative data analysis methods (statistical content analysis, network analysis, visualization, GIS analysis, etc.) are increasingly used in the field of the humanities, as well as creating applications for public use and crowdsourcing. Through creating and applying various standards, the preservation and potentially wide applicability of digital data is ensured so that the identified and tagged data can be used independently of the original applications or languages. Typically, computer programming or data processing are not part of humanities curricula, but there is an increasing need for these skills in practical research. In Western Europe and Northern America, digital humanities has evolved into an independent discipline that supports researchers of the humanities in applying the solutions that the digital era has to offer; respective research centers and chairs are being established, and it is possible to acquire academic degrees in the field. Digital methods are becoming an undeniable part of humanities education. In Estonia, the discipline is represented by computational linguistics and language technologies as independent areas of research, but the humanities in general is increasingly making use of methods and solutions that can be conceptualized within the framework of the digital humanities. For an overview about the current situation in the digital humanities in Estonia, we invited humanities scholars involved in the field of digital technologies to introduce their research, projects and applications, under construction or already in use, at the workshop ‘Estonian digital humanities A° 2013’, held on October 25 at the Estonian Literary Museum, Tartu. The workshop was organized in the hope that promoting awareness about the discipline of digital humanities and bringing researchers involved in this together would create better premises for cooperation, exchange of knowledge and communication with the outside world, and all in all, for the development of the entire discipline in Estonia. The collection at hand presents an overview of the current stage of the digital humanities in Estonia which focuses on creating infrastructures, for which there is often inevitable need deriving from practical considerations, for the purpose of managing, presenting and using the digital collections. The use of IT solutions in the research, practical applications and artistic solutions is represented as well.
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