Digital humanities….?

culled from Matthew Kirschenbaum’s “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?”

1980s: Computers and

compositionInstitutes &

Centers

Manifestos

Tenure-track positions

digital humanities is…

• …associated more with a methodological outlook than a commitment to specific set of texts or technologies (i.e., text analysis tools, data-mining tools, multimodal productions)

• …a social phenomenon that joins networks of people (i.e, the Orlando Project, archiving initiatives)

• …a body of scholarship, a pedagogy

emergence of the term

• 2001: planning for Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities: title originally included “humanities computing” (in vogue at the time); changed to “digitized humanities” to “digital humanities,” signaling a shift away from digitization as the primary activity that defined the movement

• 2004: formation of Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations

• 2006: launch of Digital Humanities Initiative by NEH

Why in English departments?

• 1. emphasis on text = enduring data type for computers to manipulate

• 2. long association between computers & composition

• 3. convergence between editorial theory & method in 80s & implementation of e-archives & editions

• 4. projects around e-literature

• 5. focus on cultural studies computers and other objects/tools of digital material culture ripe for analysis

• 6. digitization and reading (Google Books, iPad, Nook, etc.)