I would like to know if people think about digital humanities as part of the infrastructure of their colleges like the library or a service like writing programs, or if people see digital humanities as a discipline or field of inquiry with its own methods and objects of study apart from literature, language and philosophy?
For a more eloquent understanding of the issue check out this article by Kathleen Fitzpatrick in the Chronicle The Humanities, Done Digitally
I hope that link works.
pat oneill
Even though I think my interest and the work I do link a lot more to digital humanities (I think there has been tonnes of thatcamps and other events what attempt to iron what IT means), I defiintely do not come out of a traditional English background. We don’t have a ‘digital humanities’ prog where we come from though we do have big players in this area who are part of more traditional programs. I am offering an undergrad class in media archaeology next year and this is where I plan to mold my interest in history of science, history of the book and history of media, exploring digitality beyond the present. I am still figuring how to do it in a way that will be interesting yet intellectually challenging.
This is a great idea, and as someone who works out of a university without a digital humanities department or any sort of official infrastructure for this sort of work, I’m interested in how those differences play out at the institutional level.
I wonder if we could fold into a conversation like this another, very practical, question I have. It’s been suggested to me that I take a survey of the DH infrastructure available at my institution to facilitate networking across disciplines and increase support for different graduate students engaged in DH-type work, and I’d be interested in help strategizing how such a task might be undertaken efficiently and usefully.