The Digital Humanities Summer Institute and Extra-Institutional Modes of Engagement

This paper discusses the experiences of two participants in the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), a week-long workshop and lecture series designed to provide an intensive environment for learning and collaboration in the field of digital humanities outside of regular institutional curricula. The DHSI presents an opportunity to consider how digital humanities scholars define themselves as a methodological and theoretical community, given that the field is composed of scholars from a diverse range of backgrounds who may disagree strongly on the nature of the relationship between humanities and information studies that defines digital humanities as a discipline. Two major paradigms emerge, one which sees digital humanities as the application of digital tools to humanistic topics, and another which privileges critical reflection on how digital modes of writing, reading, and scholarship impact our understanding of humanistic inquiry. This paper functions as both a reflection on the DHSI as a form of extra-curricular scholarly engagement, as well as an inquiry into broader theoretical and disciplinary problems within the digital humanities