Digital Humanities Part 1: What Are the Digital Humanities?

Ask ten digital humanists what the digital humanities are and you will get at least eleven answers. There is even a website that proves it. Jason Heppler's whatisdigitalhumanities.com serves up a different scholar's definition every time you refresh the page, drawn from hundreds of self-descriptions collected during the annual Day of DH project.^[1] Heppler built it partly as a joke and partly as an argument. The definition really is that broad, and as he put it, "time spent on definitions is better spent on moving projects forward."^[1:1]

He has a point, and I will spend most of this series on projects rather than definitions. But if you are a humanities scholar or a graduate student encountering the field for the first time, you deserve a better starting place than a slot machine of quotations. So here is the working definition I will use throughout this series. Digital humanities are a contested ensemble of methods, infrastructures, pedagogies, institutions, and critical practices through which humanists create, preserve, model, analyze, publish, and critique cultural evidence in digital forms.

Every word in that sentence is doing work, and most of this essay unpacks it. "Contested" because the field has argued about its own boundaries for decades, and those arguments are themselves part of the field. "Ensemble" because no single method or tool defines it. "Cultural evidence" because the objects of humanistic study, whether a medieval manuscript, a nineteenth-century sermon, a bundle of letters, or an archaeological site, are what the whole apparatus exists to serve. And "in digital forms" because the heart of the matter is transformation. A manuscript becomes an image. A sermon becomes machine-readable text. A correspondence becomes a network. A landscape becomes a map layer. Digital humanities is the study of what happens in those transformations, what they make possible, and what they put at risk.

This is the first essay in a six-part series. In this one I want to answer the title question four ways: through the field's history, through its definition debates, through a fourfold account of what the field is (methods, institutions, pedagogy, and critique), and through concrete projects you can visit right now. By the end you should be able to recognize digital humanities work when you see it, and you should understand why the people who do it keep arguing about what to call it.

A Priest, a Punched-Card Machine, and Eleven Million Words #

Every field tells itself an origin story, and the digital humanities origin story begins with a Jesuit priest. In 1946 Father Roberto Busa, an Italian scholar of Thomas Aquinas, conceived a project that was plainly impossible by hand: a complete lemmatized concordance of the works of Aquinas and related authors, roughly eleven million words of medieval Latin.^[2] A concordance indexes every occurrence of every word. Lemmatization groups those occurrences under their dictionary headwords, so that dicit, dixit, and dicere all resolve to the same verb. Scholars had compiled concordances for centuries, but only for single books, and usually as lifelong labors. Busa wanted one for an entire corpus.

In 1949 he sailed to New York and talked his way into a meeting with Thomas J. Watson, the head of IBM. Watson was skeptical. Busa persisted, and IBM agreed to sponsor the work.^[2:1] What followed was one of the longest-running research projects in the history of the humanities. Punched-card machines gave way to magnetic tape and then to mainframe computing. The first printed volume of the Index Thomisticus appeared in 1974, the fifty-sixth and final volume in 1980, a CD-ROM edition in 1992, and a web edition in 2005.^[3] The project outlived the technologies it started on, which is a lesson this series will return to more than once.

Two things about Busa's project matter beyond its scale. The first is that Busa understood what he was doing as more than indexing. He later defined the enterprise that grew from it as "the automation of every possible analysis of human expression."^[4] That is a startlingly ambitious sentence for a man working with punched cards, and it describes much of what came after, from stylometry to topic modeling to the large language models of our own moment.

The second is that Busa did not do the work alone, and the people who did most of it were left out of the story for sixty years. Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan have reconstructed the history of the young Italian women who keypunched the corpus, trained in a school Busa established, working eight-hour days at machines. By the accounts Terras and Nyhan gathered, Busa chose women who did not know Latin "because the quality of their work was higher."^[5] Their names went unrecorded. As Terras and Nyhan write, "Busa certainly depended on their input, and our work is to write them back into the historical record."^[5:1] I start with this not to diminish Busa but because it prefigures a theme that runs through the whole field. Digital projects rest on enormous amounts of labor, much of it invisible, much of it done by people who never appear on the title page. A field that studies infrastructure has learned, slowly, to study its own.

For a fuller account of the field's emergence, Steven E. Jones has written the standard scholarly treatment of Busa's project, and his earlier book The Emergence of the Digital Humanities traces how the field took its present shape in the years around 2004 to 2008, a period he describes through William Gibson's image of cyberspace "everting," turning inside out and spilling into the physical world.^[6]

From Humanities Computing to Digital Humanities #

For half a century the field that grew from Busa's project called itself "humanities computing." It had journals, conferences, and professional societies. The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing was founded in 1973, and the Association for Computers and the Humanities followed in 1978.^[7] Humanities computing scholars built concordances and critical editions, developed text-encoding standards, and worked out the foundations of computational stylistics. The Text Encoding Initiative, founded in 1987 at a meeting at Vassar College, set out "to develop, maintain, and promulgate hardware- and software-independent methods for encoding humanities data in electronic form," and TEI encoding remains the backbone of serious digital editions today.^[8]

Then, in the early 2000s, the name changed, and that change mattered more than anyone expected.

The immediate occasion was a book. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth were editing a Blackwell anthology surveying the field, and the title they landed on was A Companion to Digital Humanities rather than A Companion to Humanities Computing. Published in 2004, the Companion defined the enterprise as "using information technology to illuminate the human record, and bringing an understanding of the human record to bear on the development and use of information technology."^[4:1] The professional societies followed. When the existing organizations formed an umbrella alliance, approved in 2005, they named it the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, and the 2006 conference was the first formally designated "Digital Humanities."^[7:1] Then the funders followed. In 2008 the National Endowment for the Humanities elevated its digital initiative into a permanent Office of Digital Humanities, with Brett Bobley as its inaugural director. The office funded nearly five hundred projects in its first decade, and Bobley described its purpose plainly: "We're building the digital infrastructure that is necessary for humanities research, preservation, and public programs."^[9]

Why did a rebranding matter? Patrik Svensson gave the most careful answer in a pair of studies of the field's discourse. The shift from "humanities computing" to "digital humanities" was not just cosmetic, he argued. It carried "a set of epistemic commitments" about what the field could contain.^[10] "Humanities computing" named a methodological specialty, computing applied to humanities materials. "Digital humanities" named something wider and vaguer, and the vagueness was productive. A broadly conceived digital humanities, Svensson wrote, "would necessarily include the instrumental, methodological, textual and digitalized, but also new study objects, multiple modes of engagement, theoretical issues from the humanities disciplines, the non-textual and the born digital."^[10:1] Under the new name, a scholar studying video game narratives, a librarian digitizing plantation records, a historian mapping census data, and a programmer building annotation software could all plausibly claim the same label.

The label spread fast. By 2011 William Pannapacker could write in the Chronicle of Higher Education that after "generations of relatively quiet progress—going back to the era of punch cards—the digital humanities has exploded into academic consciousness as the Next Big Thing."^[11] The annual conference that year was literally titled "Big Tent Digital Humanities." Hype of that kind always invites a backlash, and the backlash duly arrived. But before we get to the arguments, it is worth pausing on why a field would argue about its own name at all.

The Definition Debates and Why They Matter #

You might reasonably suspect that definitional debates are the least interesting thing about any field, the academic equivalent of a committee arguing about its charter. In the digital humanities the opposite is true. The definition debates are one of the best entry points into the field, because each major intervention reveals something real about how the field works. Three deserve your attention, and all three are freely readable online.

Start with Matthew Kirschenbaum's 2010 essay "What Is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?", probably the most-cited answer to the title question ever written.^[12] Kirschenbaum's move was to refuse the philosophical question and answer a sociological one instead. Digital humanities, he argued, is not defined by a doctrine but by an infrastructure: journals, conferences, funding programs, degree requirements, hiring lines, and above all a social network of practitioners. "DH is 'here,'" he wrote in the discussion that followed the essay on his blog, "because of people and conversations and a lot of hard work on listservs and over meals at conferences."^[12:1] Two years later he sharpened the point in an essay whose title is its thesis: "Digital Humanities As/Is a Tactical Term." The term digital humanities, he argued there, is deployed "to get things done," things like funding a staff position or establishing a curriculum, and attempts at definitive definitions "are often self-defeating, not only because they are sometimes divisive, but also because they risk effacing the material history of the term."^[13] DH, he concluded, "is a means and not an end."^[13:1]

Rafael Alvarado pushed the sociological reading to its logical conclusion. "There is no definition of digital humanities," he wrote, "if by definition we mean a consistent set of theoretical concerns and research methods." The field is "a social category, not an ontological one." Digital humanists "are simply humanists (or interpretive social scientists) by training who have embraced digital media." What holds them together, in his account, is not a method but a shared fascination, "the ongoing, playful encounter with digital representation itself."^[14]

If the field is a social category, then the interesting question becomes who belongs to it, and that question produced the sharpest fight in the field's history. At the 2011 Modern Language Association convention, Stephen Ramsay stood up on a panel and said that digital humanists build things, and that "if you are not making anything, you are not... a digital humanist."^[15] The room, and then the blogosphere, erupted. Ramsay had drawn a line through the big tent: coders and builders on one side, everyone who merely wrote about the digital on the other. Mark Sample's response gave the counter-position its slogan in its very title: "The digital humanities is not about building, it's about sharing."^[15:1] The argument became known as "hack versus yack," making versus talking, and versions of it still surface whenever someone asks whether you need to know how to program to be a digital humanist. (For what it is worth, my answer is no, but you need to understand what programming makes possible, which is a different and more reasonable demand.)

Lisa Spiro offered the most constructive way out. If the field cannot agree on a definition, she argued in "This Is Why We Fight," it can agree on values. Her proposed list included openness, "a commitment to the open exchange of ideas, the development of open content and software, and transparency," along with collaboration, collegiality, diversity, and experimentation.^[16] Spiro's essay reads today as remarkably prescient. The parts of the field that have flourished, the open-source tools, the open-access publications, the freely shared datasets and lessons, are precisely the parts her values statement predicted would define it.

These debates were significant enough that an entire anthology was assembled to document them. Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader, edited by Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte, collects the landmark essays, including several I have quoted here, and is the single best place to read the argument whole.^[17] And the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, has continued taking the field's temperature every few years, with the 2023 volume examining a field now old enough to have its own institutional midlife questions.^[18]

Why should you care about any of this if you just want to make a map or mine a corpus? Because the definition debates settled, in practice, three things that shape any project you might undertake. They settled that the field would be a big tent, which means you do not need anyone's permission or credential to start. They settled that the field's currency would be openness, which means an extraordinary amount of its infrastructure is free for you to use. And they settled that the term itself is tactical, which means when your dean or your funding agency asks what digital humanities is, the honest answer is that it is the name under which resources flow to this kind of work. That is not cynicism. That is how fields function, and the digital humanities is unusual mainly in being honest about it.

Transformations, Not Tools #

Here is the misunderstanding I most want to head off. When people first hear about the digital humanities, they usually assume it is about tools. Learn this software, install that platform, and you are doing DH. Tool lists have their place, and Part 2 of this series is full of them. But defining the field by its tools is like defining history by its filing cabinets. Tools change constantly. What persists is the thing the tools are for.

What the digital humanities actually study, and actually produce, are transformations of cultural evidence from one form to another. Consider four examples that will recur throughout this series.

A manuscript becomes an image. That sounds trivial until you think about what is gained and lost. The digital photograph travels anywhere and serves thousands of readers at once, where the vellum served one reader in one room. But the photograph flattens texture, hides watermarks, crops margins, and silently substitutes one lighting condition for the infinite variability of the object. Digitization is interpretation. Every choice about resolution, color calibration, and page sequence is an editorial decision, and scholars who use digitized sources without understanding those decisions are reading an edition while believing they read an original.

A sermon becomes machine-readable text. Optical character recognition turns a page image into searchable characters, and suddenly you can find every sermon in a million-page newspaper archive that quotes a particular verse. But OCR errs, and it errs unevenly. It reads clean modern print far better than blackletter, damaged pages, or non-Latin scripts, so the searchable archive silently overrepresents some sources and eras. The transformation enables research at a scale no human reading could achieve, while embedding biases no human reader would accept without notice.

A correspondence becomes a network. Take the letters of an eighteenth-century intellectual, record who wrote to whom, when, and from where, and you can draw the Republic of Letters as a graph, as Stanford's Mapping the Republic of Letters project did for the correspondence of Voltaire, Franklin, and their contemporaries.^[19] The network shows structures no single letter reveals, the brokers and bridges and clusters of an intellectual world. It also reduces friendship, patronage, rivalry, and love to identical edges in a diagram. The model illuminates precisely because it simplifies, and the researcher's job is to keep both halves of that sentence in view.

A place becomes a map layer. Historical gazetteers, georeferenced census data, and archaeological site records let you ask spatial questions that were previously matters of impression. Which counties had the most congregations per capita in 1926? How far did a circuit rider actually travel? The map answers, and in answering it imposes modern coordinate systems, modern boundaries, and a false precision on sources that were often vague, contradictory, or lost.

Notice the pattern. In each case the transformation creates new scholarly possibilities and new scholarly obligations at the same moment. That doubled character is, to my mind, the intellectual core of the field. The digital humanities is not the cheerleading squad for digitization. It is the discipline that understands digitization deeply enough to use it and to criticize it in one breath. Johanna Drucker's The Digital Humanities Coursebook, the best single textbook introduction to the field's methods, makes this point on nearly every page: data are not given, they are made, and every stage of making involves decisions a scholar must be able to defend.^[20]

What the Work Actually Looks Like #

Definitions only take you so far. The fastest way to understand the digital humanities is to look at actual projects, so let me show you some, starting with the scholar whose work I recommend more often than anyone else's.

Lincoln Mullen is a historian of American religion at George Mason University and the director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.^[21] He describes himself as "a historian of American religion and the nineteenth-century United States, often using computational methods for texts and maps," and that unassuming sentence covers some of the most impressive computational history I know of.^[21:1]

His project America's Public Bible is the exemplar I hand to every skeptic. Mullen wrote software to detect biblical quotations in the millions of newspaper pages digitized by the Library of Congress's Chronicling America program, then built an interactive scholarly work that, in its own words, "uncovers the history of the Bible in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States."^[22] You can watch the rise and fall of individual verses in American public discourse across a century and a half, then click through to read any verse in its original newspaper context. The project won first prize in the NEH's Chronicling America Data Challenge in 2016, and Stanford University Press published the full version in 2023 as a peer-reviewed digital monograph, one of the clearest signals yet that interactive scholarship can carry the same weight as a printed book.^[23] The NEH's own description captures why the method matters: the tracked quotations reveal "trends that are inaccessible to a single scholar's reading of these documents, yet enabling a close reading of the ways in which specific verses were put to use."^[23:1] Distant reading and close reading, in other words, are not opponents. The computation finds the passages worth reading closely.

Mullen's current large project, American Religious Ecologies, is digitizing the surviving schedules of the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies, the remarkable congregation-by-congregation survey the federal government once conducted. The team has digitized more than 227,000 schedules covering 217 denominations across 3,091 counties, creating a dataset that documents, as the project puts it, the "complex interactions between different faith traditions, institutions, and practices that together form the religious landscape of American places."^[24] If you study American religion, this is primary-source infrastructure being built for you right now, in public, with the data openly available.

Two more things about Mullen repay attention. First, he works in the open. His code is on GitHub for anyone to inspect and reuse, including an R package for detecting text reuse that other scholars have applied to entirely different corpora.^[25] Second, he thinks hard about how computational work should be written. His essay "A Braided Narrative for Digital History" argues that digital historians have been better at methods than at prose, that "digital history trades in methods more than most other forms of history," and that the field needs ways of weaving argument and method together rather than hiding one behind the other.^[26] He is also a first-rate historian by conventional measures. His book The Chance of Salvation argued that nineteenth-century America turned religion into "a system of competing options that created an obligation for more and more Americans to choose their own faith."^[27] The computational work and the interpretive work reinforce each other, which is exactly the combination this field promises and too rarely delivers.

The institution Mullen directs deserves its own introduction, because you have almost certainly used its software without knowing it. The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, founded at George Mason in 1994 by the historian it is now named for, has spent three decades pursuing Rosenzweig's mission "to use digital media and computer technology to democratize history."^[28] Democratize is a word that usually makes me reach for my wallet, but RRCHNM has earned it. Consider what the center and the nonprofit that grew from it have shipped. Zotero, the free, open-source reference manager that began at RRCHNM in 2006, may be the single most widely used piece of scholarly software in the humanities, and it remains free with, as the project pointedly notes, "no financial interest in your private information."^[29] Omeka is "a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions," and it powers digital exhibits at institutions from small historical societies to major universities.^[30] Tropy solves the unglamorous problem every archival researcher has, the thousands of photographs of documents on your phone, by letting you "organize and describe photographs of research material."^[31] PressForward turned WordPress into a scholarly publishing pipeline for aggregating and curating gray literature.^[32] And the center's September 11 Digital Archive, which collected tens of thousands of firsthand accounts and digital artifacts of the 2001 attacks, became in 2003 the first major digital acquisition accepted into the Library of Congress's permanent collections.^[33]

Consider what that list is. It is not a list of publications about the digital humanities. It is infrastructure, freely given, that changed how ordinary scholars work. When people ask me why the digital humanities deserves institutional support, RRCHNM is my first answer. Decades of patient, unglamorous, public-spirited building, and every scholar with a Zotero library is a beneficiary.

Beyond Mason, a handful of canonical projects will give you a feel for the field's range. The Walt Whitman Archive has spent decades making "Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers," including all six editions of Leaves of Grass with manuscripts and correspondence.^[34] The Valley of the Shadow, launched at the University of Virginia in 1993 under Edward Ayers and William G. Thomas III, followed two communities, one Confederate and one Union, through the Civil War via digitized newspapers, letters, and records, and stands as one of the earliest demonstrations that a digital archive could make an argument.^[35] The Old Bailey Online published the proceedings of London's central criminal court from 1674 to 1913, some 197,000 trials and 127 million words, which its creators fairly call "the largest single source of information about non-elite lives and behaviour ever published."^[36] And Voyant Tools, created by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, lets you paste in any text and explore word frequencies, trends, and contexts in your browser, which makes it the easiest possible first step if you want to try text analysis in the next five minutes.^[37]

If you work in theology or religious studies, as I do, you may have noticed how many of these examples touch our field. A Jesuit priest and the corpus of Aquinas at the origin. The Bible in American newspapers. A federal census of congregations. That is not an accident of my selection. Religious studies works with exactly the kinds of evidence that digital transformation rewards and complicates: vast textual corpora in many languages, long manuscript traditions, institutional records scattered across denominational archives, and communities whose practices leave uneven documentary traces. The field has also been present since before the beginning. Busa's project predates the computer science department. Part 3 of this series will map this territory properly, from digitized scriptural corpora to the ethics of computing on sacred texts. For now the point is simpler. Whatever your subfield, somebody has probably already transformed sources you care about into digital forms, and the quality of your work will partly depend on understanding what that transformation did to them.

Four Answers at Once: Methods, Institutions, Pedagogy, Critique #

By now you can see why single-sentence definitions fail. The field is at least four things simultaneously, and any honest introduction has to hold all four in view.

Digital humanities is a set of methods. Text analysis, network analysis, mapping and spatial history, digital editing and scholarly encoding, image analysis, 3D modeling, data visualization, and the curation and management of research data. David M. Berry and Anders Fagerjord's Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age offers a clear survey of this methodological terrain and, importantly, insists on treating knowledge and critique as a single package rather than opposites.^[38] The methods are real and learnable, and Part 2 of this series will walk through the ones most useful for dissertation writers. But methods alone do not make a field. Statistics departments do not own every discipline that uses regression.

Digital humanities is a set of institutions. Centers like RRCHNM and MATRIX, professional bodies like the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, funders like the NEH's Office of Digital Humanities, journals like Digital Humanities Quarterly, conferences, degree programs, and library units. Kirschenbaum's sociological point stands: the institutions are not an accident of the field, they are a large part of what the field is. When you ask whether your university "has" digital humanities, you are asking an institutional question, about lines, labs, and support, not a philosophical one.

Digital humanities is a pedagogy. This is the dimension outsiders most often miss. A large fraction of DH energy goes into teaching, and into rethinking what humanities teaching can be when students build projects rather than only writing papers. Brian Croxall and Diane Jakacki's collection What We Teach When We Teach DH gathers the field's hard-won classroom wisdom.^[39] And the field has built open teaching infrastructure with few parallels elsewhere in the academy. The Programming Historian, founded in 2008, publishes rigorously peer-reviewed lessons on computational methods for humanists, free to everyone, now in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, on the principle that "everyone should be able to benefit from these tutorials, not just those with large research budgets for expensive proprietary software."^[40] If you want to learn a method this field uses, someone has probably written you a free, refereed lesson on it.

And digital humanities is a critique. From early on, a strand of the field has studied the digital rather than simply using it, asking what computation does to knowledge itself. David M. Berry's collection Understanding Digital Humanities framed this agenda over a decade ago, asking how the computational turn changes the conditions under which humanities knowledge gets made.^[41] James E. Dobson's Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology pushes further, arguing that computational methods import assumptions from the sciences that humanists must interrogate rather than adopt wholesale, and that no algorithm arrives innocent of theory.^[42] I will have much more to say about this strand shortly, because it has produced some of the field's most important recent work.

Methods, institutions, pedagogy, critique. Hold those four together and the definition debates make sense. Each famous intervention in those debates was really an argument about which of the four should lead.

Living Institutional Homes #

Fields survive when institutions carry them, so let me introduce two institutional homes that show what the field looks like as a going concern in 2026, and that you can join or use today.

The first is Knowledge Commons, at hcommons.org. It launched in December 2016 as Humanities Commons, a pilot project of the Modern Language Association's scholarly communication office under Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and it set out to be what the corporate academic networks pretend to be: a scholar-governed, nonprofit network for sharing work.^[43] In 2020 it moved to Michigan State University, and in 2024 it rebranded as Knowledge Commons to reflect a membership that had grown well beyond the humanities.^[44] The network now serves tens of thousands of scholars and practitioners. Its open-access repository, KCWorks, launched on new infrastructure in October 2024, hosts more than 30,000 open-access works, assigns DOIs to deposits, and was recently selected as the NEH's designated public-access repository.^[45] In plain terms: you can make a professional profile, deposit your papers, syllabi, and datasets with permanent identifiers, build a scholarly website, and join working groups, all without surrendering your work to a venture-funded platform that will eventually sell it or paywall it. Academia.edu and ResearchGate are companies. Knowledge Commons is infrastructure, and the difference matters more every year.

The second is Michigan State University's digital humanities program, at digitalhumanities.msu.edu, which I point to as a model of what institutionalized DH looks like when it is done with care. MSU's program spans more than sixty core and affiliated faculty across twenty departments, offers an undergraduate minor in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities and a graduate certificate open to students in any discipline, and states its commitments in a tagline I wish more programs would steal: "Focused on Experience. Informed by Ethics. Open to All."^[46] Around the program sit two research units with real histories. MATRIX, the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, established in 1997, builds "collaborative and sustainable digital humanities projects, with an emphasis on the African diaspora and continent, that are open and accessible to researchers, students, and the general public."^[47] LEADR, a joint lab of the History and Anthropology departments, teaches students digital storytelling, data visualization, and digital research methods as part of ordinary coursework.^[48] MSU also hosts Knowledge Commons itself, along with the annual Global Digital Humanities Symposium. None of this is flashy. All of it is durable, and durability, as Parts 5 and 6 of this series will argue, is the hardest problem this field has.

The Critical Turn #

I said the field includes critique, and I want to make good on that claim, because if you stopped reading here you might come away thinking the digital humanities is a success story with some methodological footnotes. The field's own best thinkers would not let you off that easily.

The opening shot came from inside the house. Alan Liu's 2012 essay "Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?" observed that cultural criticism, "in both its interpretive and advocacy modes," had been "noticeably absent" from the field, that digital humanists risked becoming cheerful technicians in the service of institutions they never questioned.^[49] The field could count word frequencies across a million books, Liu argued, but it had little to say about the corporations, funding regimes, and labor arrangements that made those books countable. His challenge stuck, and much of the field's most vital work since has been an answer to it.

Feminist and intersectional scholars supplied a large part of that answer. Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, examines how gender, race, disability, and embodiment shape digital knowledge production, from whose labor builds the archives to whose bodies the interfaces assume.^[50] Remember Busa's unnamed keypunch operators. This scholarship is the field finally reckoning with the pattern they began.

Postcolonial and global critics widened the lens. Roopika Risam's New Digital Worlds documents how the digital cultural record reproduces colonial asymmetries, with the Global North's archives lavishly digitized while the Global South appears mostly as the object of someone else's dataset, and it lays out theory, praxis, and pedagogy for building otherwise.^[51] Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Domenico Fiormonte, Sukanta Chaudhuri, and Paola Ricaurte, gathers scholars writing from and about the Global South, many in translation, and makes uncomfortable reading for anyone who assumed the field's default language, infrastructure, and agenda were neutral.^[52] They are not. Bandwidth, electricity, software licensing, and the dominance of English are scholarly conditions, and the field has learned to treat them as such.

This critical strand is not a side conversation. The Debates in the Digital Humanities series, which began as a single 2012 volume and became the field's ongoing self-examination, devotes more of every volume to these questions.^[18:1] A field that started by asking "what can we compute?" now spends at least as much energy asking "who computes, who is computed, and who pays?" That evolution is the strongest evidence of the field's intellectual health.

What Lasts #

One more thread, briefly, because it points where this series ends. Digital projects die. Grant funding stops, servers get decommissioned, software dependencies rot, project directors retire, and the beautiful interactive archive that a team spent a decade building returns a 404. The University of Victoria's Endings Project has studied this problem systematically, asking "How do and how should DH projects conclude?" and developing principles for building digital scholarship that can survive its makers' attention.^[53]

One of the most compelling responses to this problem comes from the field's global wing. Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, a special interest group of ADHO, formed a working group on what it calls minimal computing after a 2014 workshop.^[54] The founding question, in Alex Gil's formulation, is disarmingly simple: "What do we need?"^[55] Roopika Risam and Gil define minimal computing as digital humanities work done under constraint, where the constraint might be "lack of access to hardware or software, network capacity, technical education, or even a reliable power grid," and as an approach that "advocates for using only the technologies that are necessary and sufficient" for the scholarship at hand.^[56] They pose four questions that I think every digital project should have to answer before it spends a dollar: what do we need, what do we have, what must we prioritize, and what are we willing to give up?^[56:1]

Minimal computing began as a response to global inequity, and it remains that. But it turns out that the same choices that make a project buildable in a low-resource setting, plain text, static sites, open formats, few dependencies, also make it preservable everywhere. The sturdiest digital scholarship and the most equitable digital scholarship converge on the same architecture. That convergence is the subject of Part 6, and it is why I wanted you to meet GO::DH now, in the essay about definitions. A field reveals what it is by what it chooses to build with. A field that chooses simplicity, so that more of the world can participate and so that its work outlives its grants, has told you something about its values that no definition could.

Where to Start #

If this essay has done its job, you want to see the field for yourself rather than read more prose about it. Here is a short path. Spend ten minutes with America's Public Bible and watch a verse rise and fall across a century of newspapers. Paste a text you know well into Voyant Tools and see what distant reading feels like. Make a free account on Knowledge Commons and look at what other scholars in your field have deposited. Browse two or three Programming Historian lessons, not to complete them but to see what is teachable. Then, if you want the arguments, read Kirschenbaum, Spiro, and Alvarado, all free online, all cited below. You will know more about what the digital humanities are than most people who use the term.

The definition I offered at the start will carry us through the rest of this series. Digital humanities are a contested ensemble of methods, infrastructures, pedagogies, institutions, and critical practices through which humanists create, preserve, model, analyze, publish, and critique cultural evidence in digital forms. Contested, because the arguments are the field. An ensemble, because no tool defines it. And aimed at cultural evidence in digital forms, because the transformations, manuscript to image, sermon to text, letters to network, place to map, are where the scholarship lives. Next time, tools, and specifically the ones that will help you finish a dissertation.

In This Series #

1. Digital Humanities Part 1: What Are the Digital Humanities? (this essay)
2. Digital Humanities Part 2: Digital Humanities Tools for Dissertations
3. Digital Humanities Part 3: Digital Humanities for Theology and Religious Studies
4. Digital Humanities Part 4: Why We Need the Digital Humanities
5. Digital Humanities Part 5: Preserving Digital Humanities Projects
6. Digital Humanities Part 6: Preservation through Minimal Computing and GO::DH

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1. Jason Heppler, "Defining Digital Humanities," jasonheppler.org, January 8, 2013, https://jasonheppler.org/2013/01/08/defining-digital-humanities/. The definition generator itself is at https://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/, drawing on participant statements from the Day of DH projects, 2009-2014. ↩︎ ↩︎

2. "Publication of Roberto Busa's Index Thomisticus," HistoryofInformation.com, Jeremy Norman, n.d., https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3077. ↩︎ ↩︎

3. "Publication of Roberto Busa's Index Thomisticus: Forty Years of Data Processing in the Humanities," HistoryofInformation.com, Jeremy Norman, n.d., https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=3515. ↩︎

4. Melissa Terras, review of A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, The Classical Review 59, no. 1 (2009): 288-290, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/171106/1/Terras_review_companiontoDH.pdf. Both Busa's definition and the Companion editors' definition are quoted in Terras's review. The anthology itself is Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds., A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). ↩︎ ↩︎

5. Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan, "Father Busa's Female Punch Card Operatives," in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/1e57217b-f262-4f25-806b-4fcf1548beb5. ↩︎ ↩︎

6. Steven E. Jones, Roberto Busa, S.J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards (New York: Routledge, 2016), https://www.routledge.com/Roberto-Busa-S-J-and-the-Emergence-of-Humanities-Computing-The-Priest-and-the-Punched-Cards/Jones/p/book/9781138587250. And Steven E. Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (New York: Routledge, 2013), https://www.routledge.com/The-Emergence-of-the-Digital-Humanities/Jones/p/book/9780415635523. ↩︎

7. "About," Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, https://adho.org/about/. ↩︎ ↩︎

8. "History," Text Encoding Initiative, https://tei-c.org/about/history/. ↩︎

9. "The Office of Digital Humanities Turns Ten," Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, Spring 2018, https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/spring/feature/the-office-digital-humanities-turns-ten. ↩︎

10. Patrik Svensson, "Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities," Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (2009), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000065/000065.html. ↩︎ ↩︎

11. William Pannapacker, "'Big Tent Digital Humanities,' a View From the Edge, Part 1," The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 31, 2011, https://www.chronicle.com/article/big-tent-digital-humanities-a-view-from-the-edge-part-1/. ↩︎

12. Matthew Kirschenbaum, "What Is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?," ADE Bulletin, no. 150 (2010), reprinted in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/f5640d43-b8eb-4d49-bc4b-eb31a16f3d06. The quoted sentence comes from Kirschenbaum's reply in the comment thread on the blog version of the essay, "What is Digital Humanities?," January 22, 2011, https://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/what-is-digital-humanities/. ↩︎ ↩︎

13. Matthew Kirschenbaum, "Digital Humanities As/Is a Tactical Term," in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/c0b0a8ee-95f0-4a9c-9451-e8ad168e3db5. ↩︎ ↩︎

14. Rafael C. Alvarado, "The Digital Humanities Situation," in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/c513af64-8f99-4e02-9869-babc1cecc451. ↩︎

15. Stephen Ramsay, "Who's In and Who's Out," remarks at the Modern Language Association convention, Los Angeles, January 2011, as quoted in Mark Sample, "The digital humanities is not about building, it's about sharing," samplereality, May 25, 2011, https://samplereality.com/2011/05/25/the-digital-humanities-is-not-about-building-its-about-sharing/. ↩︎ ↩︎

16. Lisa Spiro, "'This Is Why We Fight': Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities," in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/9e014167-c688-43ab-8b12-0f6746095335. ↩︎

17. Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte, eds., Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), https://www.routledge.com/Defining-Digital-Humanities-A-Reader/Terras-Nyhan-Vanhoutte/p/book/9781409469636. ↩︎

18. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, eds., Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2023. ↩︎ ↩︎

19. Mapping the Republic of Letters, Stanford University, dir. Dan Edelstein and Paula Findlen, https://republicofletters.stanford.edu/. See also "Mapping the Republic of Letters," Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, November/December 2013, https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/novemberdecember/feature/mapping-the-republic-letters. ↩︎

20. Johanna Drucker, The Digital Humanities Coursebook: An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), https://www.routledge.com/The-Digital-Humanities-Coursebook-An-Introduction-to-Digital-Methods-for-Research-and-Scholarship/Drucker/p/book/9780367565756. ↩︎

21. Lincoln Mullen, personal site, https://lincolnmullen.com/. His title is given on the RRCHNM staff page, "Our People," Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, https://rrchnm.org/people/. ↩︎ ↩︎

22. Lincoln A. Mullen, America's Public Bible: A Commentary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023), https://americaspublicbible.org/. ↩︎

23. "NEH Data Challenge Winner: America's Public Bible," National Endowment for the Humanities, 2016, https://www.neh.gov/divisions/preservation/featured-project/neh-data-challenge-winner-americas-public-bible. ↩︎ ↩︎

24. American Religious Ecologies, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, https://religiousecologies.org/. ↩︎

25. Lincoln Mullen, GitHub profile, https://github.com/lmullen. ↩︎

26. Lincoln Mullen, "A Braided Narrative for Digital History," in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/e5496dc6-dcc1-42e7-8609-9377d05812c5. ↩︎

27. Lincoln A. Mullen, The Chance of Salvation: A History of Conversion in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674975620. ↩︎

28. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, https://rrchnm.org/. ↩︎

29. Zotero, Digital Scholar, https://www.zotero.org/. ↩︎

30. Omeka, Digital Scholar, https://omeka.org/. ↩︎

31. Tropy, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, C2DH, and Digital Scholar, https://tropy.org/. ↩︎

32. PressForward, Digital Scholar, https://pressforward.org/. ↩︎

33. "About," The September 11 Digital Archive, American Social History Project and Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, https://911digitalarchive.org/about. ↩︎

34. "About the Archive," The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price, https://whitmanarchive.org/about/overview. ↩︎

35. The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, University of Virginia Library, dir. Edward L. Ayers and William G. Thomas III, https://valley.lib.virginia.edu/. ↩︎

36. "The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online," The Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, dir. Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, https://www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/old-bailey/. The project itself is at https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/. ↩︎

37. Voyant Tools, Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, https://voyant-tools.org/. ↩︎

38. David M. Berry and Anders Fagerjord, Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=digital-humanities-knowledge-and-critique-in-a-digital-age--9780745697659. ↩︎

39. Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki, eds., What We Teach When We Teach DH: Digital Humanities in the Classroom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023), https://upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/what-we-teach-when-we-teach-dh. ↩︎

40. "About the Programming Historian," The Programming Historian, https://programminghistorian.org/en/about. ↩︎

41. David M. Berry, ed., Understanding Digital Humanities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230371934. ↩︎

42. James E. Dobson, Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/48xfp2zp9780252042270.html. ↩︎

43. "Our History," Knowledge Commons, https://sustaining.hcommons.org/about-this-site/our-history/. The network itself is at https://hcommons.org/. ↩︎

44. "Humanities Commons is Moving to Michigan State University," MSUToday, Michigan State University, 2020, https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2020/humanities-commons-is-moving-to-michigan-state-university. On the 2024 rebrand, see "Infra Finder Spotlight: Knowledge Commons," Invest in Open Infrastructure, https://investinopen.org/blog/infra-finder-spotlight-knowledge-commons/. ↩︎

45. "Introducing KCWorks," James Madison University Libraries, https://www.lib.jmu.edu/kcworks-announcement/. ↩︎

46. DH@MSU, Michigan State University, https://digitalhumanities.msu.edu/. On the minor, see https://digitalhumanities.msu.edu/minor/. On the graduate certificate, see https://digitalhumanities.msu.edu/graduate-certificate/. ↩︎

47. "Mission," MATRIX: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, Michigan State University, https://matrix.msu.edu/mission/. ↩︎

48. LEADR: Lab for the Education and Advancement in Digital Research, Michigan State University, https://leadr.msu.edu/. ↩︎

49. Alan Liu, "Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?," in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), full text on Liu's site at https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/where-is-cultural-criticism-in-the-digital-humanities/. ↩︎

50. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, eds., Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/bodies-of-information. ↩︎

51. Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810138858/new-digital-worlds/. ↩︎

52. Domenico Fiormonte, Sukanta Chaudhuri, and Paola Ricaurte, eds., Global Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/global-debates-in-the-digital-humanities. ↩︎

53. The Endings Project, Humanities Computing and Media Centre, University of Victoria, https://endings.uvic.ca/index.html. ↩︎

54. Minimal Computing, a working group of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH), Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/. ↩︎

55. Alex Gil, "The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make," Minimal Computing, May 21, 2015, https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/. ↩︎

56. Roopika Risam and Alex Gil, "Introduction: The Questions of Minimal Computing," Digital Humanities Quarterly 16, no. 2 (2022), https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/2/000646/000646.html. ↩︎ ↩︎