(This is a Facebook comment I made in response to Federico Meschini’s response to Matthew Kirschenbaum talk at Loyola University (of the same title). I will try and find a copy of the lecture and get back to you).
Ideas exist in political economies. And interdisciplinary relationships exist in political economies. Even though I am a historian very much on the ‘new media’ side of the spectrum (not in an academic job), I have nothing but respect for humanists who have taken much more risky paths in their career (and may or may not have been rewarded by it).
By risky I mean academic pursuits that are extraordinarily important, but may be marginal to the mainstream vocational marketplace (ie classics). There are lots of jobs in computing, and not many in humanities and I suspect that the rise of ‘Digital Humanities’ in the US has something to do with this. It is scholars hedging their bets in a scary market place for humanities graduates.
The great danger of the Digital Humanities is that it will be hijacked by market led passivity.
The Digital Humanities have been extraordinary successful in the more canonical and established institutions in the west, but what if less-academically powerful institutions are forced to take different paths? (and universities are powerful in different ways and in different social contexts).
In my own city there are at least 3 massive universities that produce armies of technologist but employ hardy any humanities scholars? There is a inherent danger that I won’t make explicit for the fear of being lined up and shot.
I see two fronts opening up in the DH.
1) there is our traditional task of applying computing technology to humanities tasks. Not necessarily in a modernist way, but in a traditional scholarly way.
2) There is the new task of making sure that the DH ‘band wagon’ doesn’t become so large that our voices get drowned out by modernist impulses.
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