Making Of A Historian

One of the BIG THINGS these days are the ‘Digital Humanities’—a set of approaches that bring the power of computers to traditional humanistic questions. I was asked to present an introductory talk about Digital Humanities: here is a version of that talk. The problem is that people aren’t really sure just what the Digital Humanities are. The joke is that every conference, talk, meet-up or working group about DH begins with the question “Just what is Digital Humanities.” I think that’s because there are two different views of what DH should be. First is the ‘soft’ view—DH is just a ‘big tent’ designation for whatever it is that humanists do when they get access to computers. Second is the ‘hard’ view—DH is a fundamentally different way of doing scholarship, that might not even be particularly humanistic. A lot of detractors of Digital Humanities take the hard view. They say that DH is a con-game. Practitioners say that it’s just a collection of methods, but really it’s a sneaky trick of the neoliberal esta