With the kind permission of the Association of Departments of English and the MLA, I’m very pleased to make available advance proofs final copy of my article “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” (PDF)
This piece was originally written for presentation at the ADE Summer Seminar East at the University of Maryland in June, 2010. It will appear in the upcoming issue of the ADE Bulletin, along with companion essays by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and N. Katherine Hayles. All three of our essays will be open access.
Comments appreciated.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum 
As I note in the first paragraph of this short essay, “What is Digital Humanities?” is already a genre piece and there’s been an awful lot of reflective writing about DH especially lately. (This was written shortly after #mla09, and now we’re already post-#mla11.) So what, if anything, new do I imagine myself contributing here? I think there are a few key points this essay tries to make.
1. That a lot of the hand-wringing and anxiety over “What is digital humanities” bespeaks a certain amount of intellectual laziness, by plain virtue of the fact that so much has already been written on that very topic. This is not to say that the discussion and debates have been resolved, but anyone who wants to seriously enter into those discussions and debates bears a responsibility to ground themselves in the literature that already exists.
2. I will admit to having had some fun with the portion of the narrative that relates the smokey back-room lunch-napkin back-story behind DH. But there’s a more serious point at stake: ultimately the emergence of DH has been a social process, facilitated by people who have had friendships and working relationships with one another for decades. DH is “here” because of people and conversations and a lot of hard work on listservs and over meals at conferences and long-distance phone calls (yes, this was before Skype).
3. Which leads directly to a third point: there is an enormous amount of academic infrastructure–conferences, journals, granting agencies, degree programs–already in place around DH. Or as Steve Ramsay recently put it: “Digital humanities is not some airy Lyceum.” To engage with DH means engaging with specific institutions, entities, agencies, and individuals. Unlike some who frame DH around questions of methodology or building, I’ve tried in my writing to emphasize the material infrastructure and investment behind the field. This may not ultimately be sufficient, but I do believe it is necessary.
4. This piece is the first of several attempts for me to engage the Twitter/DH nexus. My “Stars” entry immediately before this one on this blog is a second and more recent attempt. I’ll also be writing on this subject for Matthew Gold’s forthcoming volume on _Debates in Digital Humanities_, which should be out at the end of the year from Minnesota. The point I see as consistent across all three pieces is the way in which Twitter’s functional conventions–followers, replies, retweets, etc.–serve to refiy power structures within DH as a field. This is (as I will argue in my piece for Matt) unique with regard to earlier communication channels for digital humanities, such as the Humanist listserv and first generation blogging. The implications are not yet fully known or settled in my view.
5. Finally, I think the piece does a good job of explaining why digital humanities has been particularly at home in English departments, though of course I recognize that there are many other academic and institutional venues for good DH work.
Comments?