As noted in most of the readings this week (and you will see in the following weeks), there is no shortage of definitions for the digital humanities. Check out this site for a endless supply of definitions of digital humanities. Keep refreshing the page and you get a new definition from between 2009-2014.

As I noted on Tuesday, we are more interested in what these definitions tell us about the contours of DH –who is included, who is excluded, what type of work counts, what doesn’t, what are the stakes in defining DH a certain way, what agendas may be highlighted and what is left out?

We also want to look at the arc of DH–in historical, social, scholarly, material terms. Not so much a “history” of DH, as an account of the registers through which and the scales at which DH has operated in practice and theory.

A few themes and questions to get us started from the readings:

  • How can we put McPherson’s notion of lenticular logic in conversation with Jones’ suggestion of eversion to better understand the boundaries and imaginaries of the digital and digital humanities?
  • Cultural contexts, material realities, racial logics, and both data and physical structures all came up in each reading, let’s examine what these areas of emphasis help us see about the digital, about networks and about the movements between.
  • Kirschenbaum lists six reasons why English departments have been fertile ground for dh. What does this list do to help us think through the possibilities as well as the limits of this disciplinary grounding?
  • How is dh scholarship and research imagined by each author?
  • What were some areas of interest for you that you want to know more about?