I think that there are already many students and scholars who are using technological tools but see no distinction between their work and the work undertaken by colleagues who are not using those tools. I think that you can see this in the field of archaeology. Archaeologists started using technology to aid in their studies about 30 years ago. In the last 10, GIS has been readily accepted throughout the field. Many are using it, and there is no longer a distinction between archaeologists who use GIS and those who do not. The challenge, then, is to figure out how to get scholars from other humanities disciplines to recognize the potential of technological tools. I have a feeling many scholars are not as close-minded about technology as some of use would think. And those that are highly resistant to the tools, even after illustration of tangible results, can be dealt with (as one wise man once said about this issue) one funeral at a time.

Is that what you say about Wikipedia articles also? 😉

Maybe we can just agree that as long as we work with or produce for the public, then what we do is bound to be relevant for them at some level.

I share your enthusiasm about the mainstreaming of digital humanities. I would have smiled too if a student of mine had made that kind of observation. I guess it remains to be seen how egalitarian our field of digital humanities will become.

You are absolutely right that we can do a better job of learning from our critics. I have sought out some of their writings and put them on my reading list:

www.zotero.org/groups/digital_history/items/collection/136593

www.zotero.org/groups/digital_history/items/collection/136394

But let me just state for the record that I will not lie about who I am or what I believe in order to get a job. My department has already tried, more than once, to punish me for my blogging. I expect similar resistance from many others in our profession once they realize the stakes involved. I just hope there will be mutual respect, genuine dialogue, a tolerance for new ideas, and willingness to change when doing so makes sense.

I never know what people mean when they say they want the humanities to be relevant. Of course history is relevant, it explains how you got here. What people seem to mean by “relevant” is either practical (“History will make you a better lawyer!”) or political (“So you see, the Halfway Covenant illustrates why you should vote for Obama.”). Either way, I’m agin’ it.

As to the mainstreaming of digital humanities, let us hope so. This quarter in my digital history class a student raised an interesting point. I forget the exact wording but he pointed out that the same dozen names came up again and again in many of the things we were reading, and they all seemed to work at a half-dozen places, and their claims to fame were a limited series of high-tech online history projects (ie: Valley of the Shadow)… The gist of his comment was that digital history seemed more like an expensive private fraternity than a widespread movement. I gave him an A right there.

(And Sterling, you and I could learn from Mr. Mentor, prickly as he is.)

I respect your right to share your opinions about me and to insult the field of digital humanities. I noticed that your comment seemed much more directed at the readers of this blog than at the author of this post. So I look forward to hearing what my colleagues have to say. I am not ashamed by what I wrote. And you can thank me for helping you to take your own advice and attaching your name to your writings.

You sound fairly optimistic about intellectual accommodation. I suppose I am less sanguine. I have known professors whose colleagues have voted to deny them tenure because they strayed too far outside of the orthodoxy for traditional historical methods. Examples would include privileging oral history over textual records, straying too far into the realms of economics or sociology, or violating the cardinal rule of individual authorship. Maybe we need to do a better job of testing the waters and figuring out how far our fellow humanists will allow us to stray from the traditional research methods of the humanities before we are considered heretics.

I think you raise a fair question in asking whether we can realistically expect doctoral students in the digital humanities to learn the ins and outs of interdisciplinary work spanning the cognitive, computer, information, and social sciences. There are a lot of reasons to expect what you say about specialization to come true. But if fragmentation has been the default mode for academic disciplines over the last few decades, we should also be asking how it was ever possible for cognitive science, which is interested in computational approaches to intelligence, to emerge as a new and distinct discipline that is now represented in programs on over sixty college campuses. Another example, perhaps closer to our disciplinary homes, is the recent rise of academic centers and doctoral programs in social complexity and the computational social sciences. Were these just exceptions to the overall general pattern in academia? Or do they suggest that the impulse to engage in interdisciplinary work has sometimes overwhelmed disciplinary boundaries?

I love your final question. I look forward to what others have to say about avoiding the pitfalls of quantitative social history in the 1970s. There may be lessons in our past that prove relevant for navigating the disciplinary terrain of the present and future.

In terms of the broader intellectual questions, that’s probably going to depend heavily on the type of graduate training that exists for the current and next cohort of doctoral students in the humanities. Here, we’re asking what may be an impossible stretch: “Learn the latest tech, learn the deep knowledge of the discipline, oh, yes, and don’t forget that most of you will not have R1-type jobs where you’ll be able to do your day job, continue to read in the discipline, and also conduct the research that’s publishable.” I think we’re inevitably going to see fragmentation/specialization, which will produce interesting work but leave the bigger intellectual questions on the table, or at least to the side.

But I wouldn’t assume that’s any worse than the fate of quantitative social-science history. There are plenty of productive social and cultural historians who acknowledge the role of quantitative research, and they’re willing to put in a table (or two) in a book.

So maybe one conversation at THATCamp could focus around, “how could the fate of digital humanities be better than quantitative social history?”