Hi, I’m Sarah, a second-year grad student in Northwestern’s English PhD program, focusing on Victorian novels and periodicals.  And I’m a paperholic.

Why not start with frankness: a lot about the digital humanities causes me anxiety.  I worry about new kinds of elitism, based on programming skills or being adept at social media.  I worry that an explosion of texts and viewpoints will completely eclipse the canon and make humanities a constant hollering study of the now.  I worry that my daughter will not have a passionate relationship with the written word, because it will simply be one more Times New Roman widget on a screen.  Maybe not least, I worry that all of these worries just mean I’m already being left behind, my mind simply unsuited to this new historical epoch that previous poster JAJ752, correctly, I think, identifies as one primary definition of DH.

So I’m here, at least in part, because I want to be quite conscious about this anxiety, so that I won’t end up grumbling in a brick-and-mortar library somewhere as the men come to take all the books away.  Flippancy aside, I want to avoid that stubborn stasis and move deliberately forward, because DH is forward.  It is a (likely irreversible, barring some sort of imminent apocalypse) change in the way we humanists do things, and, increasingly, in our understanding of the things we do.  And it’s this emphasis on action that makes me feel as if the anxiety, the sense of uncertainty and loss, will pass, because there are new things to be learned (which has always been the humanities’ bailiwick) and new things to be done (which is my own motivation for work in the humanities — their ability to eventually impact even non-scholars, people who are often busy enough just being human).  Like Beth, I found the HASTAC Scholars blog post on the three central categories of DH work extraordinarily helpful, precisely because it solidifies the “do” part.

So, I guess I want to define digital humanities by the interaction of those terms.  I think the tendency is to think of DH essentially in the way the old term — humanities computing — suggested: that it is simply the application of technology to humanities, computer people helping book people greet the modern age.  But I think it is — or ought to be — more interactive than that, with book people (yes, yes, I really get that this shorthand is simplistic!) informing the development of technology for the humanities so that it isn’t just about quantity of new data, but about developing technology that is humanistic.  For example, my ability to use books as data mines, my gleeful keyword searching of Google books and databases of scanned periodicals, my noting of patterns impossible to see while paging through at human brain speed, is inextricable from my previous relationship to them as books, physical chunks of discrete ideas.  I don’t care about the data without the existence of the entity about which the data can tell me more.  I think the humanities can make the digital more aware of the human significance of packaging and dividing data in ways which continue to engage us, in ways that go beyond mere scholarly use-value.  If I’m going to read Dickens’ 1850s journal online, can I have rich, full-color scans on a touchscreen which can reproduce the original size and which allows me to turn, and even shuffle, the pages in the way that 1850s readers did?