Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be reading through the list of resources found here on the Digital Humanities. For each source, I hope to write a summary and the start building some work around the lessons I’m learning.
The first entry today summarizes Matthew Gold’s introductory essay, “The Digital Humanities Moment” from the book Debates in the Digital Humanities.
Context
Matthew Gold’s introductory essay establishes a context for the “Digital Humanities” (henceforth, DH) moment, takes stock of what DH has done and could do, and offers up the Introduction volume’s aims in helping DH achieve its goals.
DH is getting a lot of press from academic and non-academic sources. This is because DH is gaining traction at a moment of crisis for the humanities. DH could potentially be the future of the humanities, a beacon of light in a darkened academic world of a particular discipline. In fact, DH is already getting major funding and getting vast institutional support while more traditional humanities lines are seeing decreases in budgets and interest.
Key Questions
With that success has come self-reflexivity. Who is an actual digital humanist? What kind of work do digital humanists produce? How should we evaluate that work? These are some of the key definitional problems facing DH at the moment, and Gold claims the volume he’s introducing will address them.
Some Answers
The book’s aim is not to simply celebrate DH but to interrogate it. As a sign of what DH can offer as well back-up that interrogation ethos, the introductory volume was subject to three different rounds of editing, each one taking advantage of new technological breakthroughs that allowed skeptics and fans alike to see the essays as they were being written. In keeping with DH’s focus on “in process” work, the introductory volume itself will have several incarnations: physical book, open text e-book, and ongoing revision.
This post is the second in a series of summary articles about a new edited collection on the Digital Humanities.