Kirschenbaum begins his exploration of DH by posing a quote from selfe.  She writes, “As a profession, we are just learning how to live with computers…”.  Whatever the digital humanities are at this point in time does not mean that this definition will continue.  As a number of different candidates for a position in the digital humanities have passed through Clemson, I find myself more confused about what DH “is”. 

Kirchenbaum equates DH to “humanities computing”, which looks a lot like (in some ways?) Katherine Hayles notion of machine reading and Moretti’s ideas of data mining and “distance reading”.  Much of the digital humanities are not concerned with composing new arguments or analyzing any one argument, but rather they are concerned with analyzing an entire corpus or writing code to do analysis for you. 

Perhaps  in the past most of my notions of DH have come from professors who value the digital and employ it in their research and using pedagogy.  But, many of those who have become more familiar to me recently seem to be using DH for more empirical means.  I feel that this should be resisted. 

While it is a given that at some point in time (hopefully?) at least some (more) consensus will be gained about what DH is.  Kirschenbaum explains that because of the openness of many English departments to teaching culture and literature and literacy and many other things aside that DH or some new brand of literacy can fit.  Based on Moretti’s work with DH and distance reading in particular, I can see some utility in the process, but I am very resistant of limiting DH to some particular aspect of the humanities.

As a “new” and often undefined term, digital humanities is an opportunity for scholars to self identify.  Much of my resistance comes from the idea that some scholars would try to keep others off of their “DH” jungle gym because they disagree with the kind of work that they are doing.  I love that a Wikipedia article is cited in this piece.  In other works perhaps that would be less appropriate, but the fact that it works for this work seems important to me.