Collecting ourselves

Digital humanities has become an influential and widely adopted term only in the past decade. Beyond the rapid multiplication of associations, centres, conferences, journals, projects, blogs, and tweets frequently used to signal this emergence, if anything characterizes the field during this time it is a concern with definition. This focus is acknowledged and reflected, for instance, in Matthew Gold’s 2012 edited collection, Debates in Digital Humanities. The debates surveyed are overwhelmingly definitional: ‘As digital humanities has received increasing attention and newfound cachet, its discourse has grown introspective and self-reflexive’ (x). Questions that Gold identifies as central to and expressive of the emerging field include: Does one need to build or make things to be part of the digital humanities? ‘Does DH need theory? Does it have a politics? Is it accessible to all members of the profession’, or only those working at elite, well-funded institutions? ‘Can it save the humanities? The university?’ (xi). The 2013 collection Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader (Terras et al. 2013) also reflects this focus, bringing together historical and contemporary readings on the act of defining digital humanities, many of which, not incidentally, are canonical in the field. Other areas of activity are equally self-reflexive, including the field’s various manifestos1 and the annual Day of Digital Humanities, where definitions are crowdsourced and participants are asked to document through text and image ‘what digital humanists really do’. Despite this long-standing preoccupation, no clear agreement on a definition has emerged beyond broad references to research, teaching, and technical innovation at the intersection of humanities and computing. And within this broad description, commentators emphasize different aspects of the intersection—historical, institutional, political, economic, or social—as the aims and scope of digital humanities continue to be debated. Why, then, is digital humanities so focused on defining itself, yet unable to arrive at an agreed-upon definition? Many have assessed this situation from a positive angle. Gold, for instance, suggests that such introspection simply marks ‘a field in the midst of growing pains as its adherents expand from a small circle of like-minded scholars to a more heterogeneous set of practitioners who sometimes ask more disruptive questions’ (Gold 2012, x–xi). Alan Liu (2013) identifies this focus as a characteristic that digital humanities shares with a number of past fields, and thus, presumably, a relatively normal stage of development andmaturation. We could add that even the most mature disciplines have adapted and shifted their boundaries in recent decades as the practices and rhetoric of interdisciplinary research have extended the scope of traditional pursuits. The definitional debate has also expressed many positive aims for digital humanities and the humanities more broadly, including openness beyond the university; the importance of interdisciplinary and global connections, conversations, and collaborations; critiques of established forms of hiring, peer review, and publication; and the importance of valuing—and making a case for the value of—humanities scholarship