Introduction: what is DH, and does anyone care?
There is a whole genre of writing out there on the subject of “What is Digital Humanities?”. For some, this is an existential question, fundamental to the basis of research, teaching and the environment of those parts of the academy which exist between computing and the humanities. For others, it is a semantic curiosity, part of an evolution of terminology from “computing in the humanities” to “humanities computing”, finally arriving at “digital humanities” when the instrumentalist implications of the first two no longer encompassed the field of activities described. For others still, it is a relic of 1990s angst over terminology as computing began to permeate the academic environment. Whichever camp one is in, it behoves people, like me, with Digital Humanities in their job title to revisit the question from time to time. This post is an attempt at this, with a particular emphasis on the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King’s College London. The strap-line of the present-day DDH is “critical research with and about the digital”. In what follows, I hope to unpack what I think this means for the field, and for DDH, which has been my institutional home since 2006. Those fourteen years have seen immense changes, both in the Department and in the field of Digital Humanities (hereafter DH) more broadly. Furthermore, tomorrow (1st February) marks six months since I took over as Head of Department of DDH. Therefore, this seems as good a moment as any for a moment of autobiographically driven reflection. I state, of course, the usual disclaimers. Like any healthy academic environment, (D)DH is marked by a diversity of views, a diversity we pride ourselves on embracing and celebrating; and despite being Head of Department, I speak only for myself, in a very personal capacity. Also, any errors of fact or interpretation in what follows are mine and mine alone.
Before I arrived at King’s, I worked for the AHRC’s ICT in Arts and Humanities Initiative at the University of Reading (to the great credit of Reading’s web support services, the AHRC ICT programme’s web pages, complete with the quintessentially 1990s banner I designed, are still available). At the time, I was no doubt suffering a colossal intellectual hangover from my efforts to apply GIS to Bronze Age Aegean volcanic tephrachronology and its archaeological/cultural contexts, and this may have coloured my view of things; but the purpose of this programme was to scope how computing might change the landscape of the humanities, and to funnel public money accordingly. This is the kind of thing that the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US has done, to great acclaim, with its Office for Digital Humanities.