What Is Digital Humanities?

I think, however, you misread the text, or rather projected a certain easily dismissed critique onto it. My point was to understand what digital humanities is, as I put it, as an "epiphenomenon of the tectonic encounter between this world of computing, with its newly acquired 'Silicon Valley sex appeal,' and the world of ideas." The point of the supposed "Sex Appeal" line is not to denigrate the importance of computing or the digital humanities; quite to the contrary, it is to note that in contrast to the past computing has been elevated to a level of cultural importance that perhaps matches the revolutionary nature of the technological changes it has produced.

I agree completely with Kirschenbaum in the passage you quoted above when he rejects the notion that: "Digital humanities is complicit. Digital humanities is naive. Digital humanities is hollow huckster boosterism. Digital humanities is managerial. Digital humanities is the academic import of Silicon Valley solutionism...." My point here is precisely that "digital humanities" is that domain through which the academy is renegotiating its relationship to the broader culture, redefining the relationship of its traditional values of critique in relationship to the properties of the cultural world "outside" that is being so radically redefined by computing.

In other words, I see digital humanities as one of the most exciting cultural sites of complex cultural transformation that there is today, and in no way am I reiterating the critique to which your refer.

One point, however, where I'd like to challenge you. Your reference to "position" is I think an interesting one because it points to a fairly traditional approach to professional formation in the academy. It's a fairly common posture within a new or emerging profession to attempt to establish a "domain", to establish lines of jurisdictional control, and to begin to build a historical narrative that grounds that new domain in time, giving it a "tradition." There's a certain parallel here between the myth-building that goes along with constructing national narratives to reinforce the idea of the nation and what the myth-building that professions do about their own history. This I would suggest is why the 1949 date is so "useful," as you put it. It provides digital humanities with its own ontology.

That said, one of the things I find interesting about digital humanities is the way it is on some level potentially so fundamentally interdisciplinary. Indeed, one of the interesting consequences of thinking of digital humanities not as a traditional "profession" but rather, as I did here, as a site of cultural renegotiation, as a "tectonic" meeting of cultural spheres, capable of creating a cultural "quake" (forgive the metaphors), is that it eludes this tendency to define a profession in terms of a specific domain and orthodoxy.

So I guess what I am suggesting here is in some respects an alternative and unorthodox way of assessing the growth of a new sphere of cultural production and exploration. I wonder if this isn't particularly appropriate for the digital humanities. So I guess that's my question for you: would you like to see the digital humanities as its own professional domain, e.g. one day that every university will have its "Digital Humanities" or "Humanities Computing" department? I wonder, somehow, if this kind of outcome would mean that the kind of cultural renegotiation that I was (rather hopefully) anticipating had fallen on its face. Curious to know what you think.