“An art, not a science”? LIS, digital humanities, and the call to undiscipline

Abstract

The origin date of digital humanities (DH) is as contested as virtually everything else about it, but the contexts in which I first heard the term were laced with disciplinary anxiety, despair, and derision.

I’d started an English PhD amid 2009’s economic doomscape, and peers on the market were seeing “digital humanities” appear in job postings in vague, seemingly incongruous ways. What did a “secondary specialization in digital humanities” entail, and how could it possibly pertain to subdisciplines spanning Medieval Studies and global Anglophone literatures and Victorian fiction? Facing this quandary, some dismissed DH wholesale as a gimmicky way to court STEM funding without doing any “real” humanities work, while others made Moby Dick word clouds in desperate bids to qualify themselves for those postings.