Neoliberal or radical?
Some critics see digital humanities as a force of neoliberalism within academia, co-opting traditional humanities by emphasizing the creation of “marketable” projects and student training geared toward a technocentric economy. These critics feel DH places too much emphasis on instrumentalization and capitalist interests, drawing attention and resources away from humanities work that values reading widely, engaging with history, and holding contradictions. This vision construes DH as a public relations ploy, an effort to save the humanities by cross-breeding with (more popular and well funded) “STEM” tools and fields.
Others see the possibilities of digital humanities as a genuine way for the humanities to respond to and engage deeply with the world we live in. Certainly, digital humanities projects — often accessible, appealing, public-facing — can attract larger and wider audiences compared to the “almost complete lack of interest among journalists and the public in most traditional humanities research” which, despite efforts of the public humanities, still remains sequestered in elite information channels (Berry and Fagerjord, 2017).
Digital humanities will not “save” the humanities; nor should digital humanities be treated as a “threat” to humanistic inquiry. Ideally, digital humanities can both serve the traditional values of humanistic inquiry and open up new questions and methods. DH can, and should, retain an interest in “concerns for history, for aesthetics, for language and culture, and for philosophical understanding of human life and thought,” and it need not automatically serve “neoliberal capitalist ideologies or instrumentalism in education” (Berry and Fagerjord, 2017).
In fact, some digital humanists consider themselves part of the alternative academic (or #altac) movement. DH stretches across strictly delineated disciplines, and its “notion of scholarly work tends to be wider than in normalized forms of academic output, such as monographs and academic papers” (Berry and Fagerjord, 2017); DH projects may look like websites, apps, softwares, encodings, databases, metadata, and visualizations. Embracing interdisciplinarity and non-standard presentation methods, digital humanists often do not fit in existing structures of academic institutions. If a university requires a minimum number of publications for a professor to be considered for tenure, how should building a database be considered? With what department should digital humanists be affiliated — computer science or the humanities department nearest to the research they do (i.e., English, history, etc.)? Though many universities now have centers for digital humanities, it is still rare to see DH institutionalized as a department — and such an interdisciplinary field may wish to avoid the structures of departmentalization anyway.
Whether construed as neoliberal or radical, savior or threat, digital humanities sparks conversations about the structures of academia, the purposes of higher education, and the strategies traditional disciplines and academic institutions can use to adapt to our digital age. Digital humanities has much to say about the future of these issues and our computerized culture.
The future of digital humanities
Interdisciplinary connections
As an inherently interdisciplinary field, digital humanities — especially in its more reflexive, theory-interested third wave — finds kinship in other academic areas interested in computerization, digital culture, and humanistic inquiry.
The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (2018) considers the connections between digital humanities and media studies. Media studies is especially interested in “new media,” media that is digital, modular, automated, variable, and transcoded (combining computation and culture). New media studies embraces the notion that “we are entangled with the media we produce and research, not separate from them” (Sayers, 2018).
Another field that fruitfully connects with media studies and digital humanities is “remix studies,” explored in The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies and Digital Humanities (2021). Rooted in practices in art and music, remix studies examines “remix culture” or “the act of using preexisting materials to create something new as desired by any creator—from amateurs to professionals” (Navas, Gallagher, and burrough, 2021). The field emerged was recently established “due to the need to evaluate and understand how creativity functions with the appropriation, recycling, and transformation of content in all forms of communication” (Navas, Gallagher, and burrough, 2021).
Remix studies, media studies, and digital humanities are all interdisciplinary fields interested in examining how art and culture is affected and transformed by computerization and digitization. These fields can help scholars develop new methods of inquiry when working with born-digital materials.
Intersectional perspectives
Digital humanities has been criticized for reproducing academic and political hierarchies. As Drucker summarizes,