Editors’ Choice: The Destructiveness of the Digital Humanities

In what purport to be responses or rebuttals to critiques I and others have offered of Digital Humanities (DH), my argument is routinely misrepresented in a fundamental way. I am almost always said to oppose the use of digital technology in the humanities. This happens despite the fact that I and those I have worked with use digital technologies in hundreds of ways in our research and that our critiques—typically including exactly the ones DHers are responding to—make this explicit.

It is undeniable that DH is in some sense organized around the use of some digital tools (but not others, and this gap is itself is a very important part of how, on my analysis, the DH formation operates, a matter I have written about at some length). What I and the scholars I work with, as opposed to some conservative pundits, worry about is not the use of digital technology in the humanities. Speaking only for myself, what I oppose most strongly is the attitude toward the rest of the humanities I find widespread in DH circles: the view that the rest of the humanities (and particularly literary studies) are benighted, old-fashioned, out of date, and/or “traditional.”