Interdisciplining Digital Humanities

Front matter

Interdisciplining Boundary

Work in an

Digital Humanities Emerging Field

Foreword

Cathy N. Davidson

Julie Thompson Klein has written a capaciously definitional book. By that I mean, at this crucial moment in the formation of the many fields that, together, intertwine to be called “digital humanities,” Klein provides an invaluable guidebook that resists the temptation to restrict and, instead, invites exploration. [nterdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field challenges the reader to not only visit the intellectual bounty across, around, and in and about digital humanities, but also helps us to explain its evolution. How did we get here? Where are we now? How far can we go? For an emerging field to become an established field, this work marks a necessary and vital contribution at the right moment.

This book will have many audiences at once and is the rare publication that actually keeps those multiple audiences in mind. Whereas most books that have this level of sophistication do not explain their founding principles, Klein patiently (and provocatively) explicates the basics— keywords, disciplinary inheritances, historical legacies, originating voices. We are never left to feel as if there is a conversation happening and we are not part of it. Rather, by analyzing the deepest assumptions and principles of the field, Klein also brings the reader up to speed, allowing us to run along when she makes her most demanding and expansive case for the way interdisciplinarity forms digital humanities and the way the digital humanities offer a new formation to classic accounts of interdisciplinarity.

This book should be required reading for anyone interested in the digital humanities, beginning student or founding figure. Its appreciations are viii / Foreword wide and original. That means Klein makes the best case for the importance of the field and shows us how some of its most seminal debates, arguments, differences, and disjunctions have, over the last decades now, helped to form its vibrancy, relevance, scope, and impact in the academy and in the more public intellectual work of museums, libraries, and other civic spaces.

To my mind, one of the most important audiences for this book sits on academic committees that judge the quality of work produced within it. Especially for those who make hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, Interdisciplining Digital Humanities is indispensable. In the academy, we are often called upon to judge the integrity of research outside our own field of expertise. We often rely upon peers we trust for judgment and those peers may or may not carry our own prejudices and predilections as part of their judgments. When a disciplinary boundary is traversed, it can sometimes look, to the more clearly defined disciplinary peer, as if it has been violated, ignored, or, in the case of junior colleagues, not yet been mastered. Klein helps those who do not understand the digital humanities to see how they, in fact, can both contribute vitally to central disciplines and also work through the assumptions at the heart of those disciplines, including methodologically. Digital humanities do so not out of naiveté but out of the interdiscipline’s own generic needs. A literary professor doing a close reading of one novel, for example, may not need to know how to use or design algorithms for network analysis; a digital humanist understanding word clustering in 200 nineteenth-century British novels most certainly does. The outcome of this second kind of work may well also be a critical interpretation of texts, but that final analysis is by no means the only part of the process that is of intellectual significance. In the manner of many fields in the quantitative social sciences, the process on the way to the analysis is itself something that needs to be carefully, clearly documented and, in the end, is something also to be evaluated by those determining scholarly contribution.

Klein defines the contours of several fields —from computation to datadriven or “Big Data” analysis to visualization on the “digital” or technology side and to the full array of the humanities and interpretive social sciences. More importantly, she shows how, in the digital humanities, it is often the combination of and interplay between and across fields that results in the most exciting work—including work that requires a “meta analysis” of the fields themselves.

Foreword / ix

For example, in addressing the formidable contribution of the journal Vectors, including its summer programs where scholars and designers worked together to learn about one another's respective fields in order to learn how to collaborate, Klein shows the merging of different media, different vocabularies, different expertise, and even different ways of “seeing” the world that are key to the digital humanities. Klein notes that what emerged in the Vectors seminars were “bottom-up . . . conversations about how scholarship might be reimagined in a dynamic digital vernacular. The outcome is not a pre-determined tool for delivery.” She notes that the result of the Vectors seminars is not just an exploratory, multimodal publication but a cadre of trained interdisciplinary collaborators plus an array of tools (the middleware package, the Dynamic Backend Generator) that allow those collaborators to work together in a digital environment.

In walking us through examples with such patience, Klein shows how interdisciplinary is this field of digital humanities in its practices, its tools, its methods, and its publications. She also shows how all of those things— practices, tools, methodology, publication—are the object of study of the digital humanities. Vectors is not just a major scholarly publication, in other words, but an entire process that helps us to think about what we mean by “major scholarly publication.” The published article, in other words, is by no means the only finished product of the research. The development of the middleware itself is part of the research, an outcome, a tangible asset, and needs to be judged as part of the scholarly productivity of the digital humanists who created it. Appointment, promotion, and tenure committees are accustomed to understanding such outcomes in the portfolios of engineers but rarely of literary scholars, art historians, classics scholars, and other humanists.

Klein shows us why our evaluation of “what counts” within digital humanities as a performed interdiscipline must change from the standard idea of “what counts” in most humanities fields. By the precision of her analysis, and her strong citation of individual exemplars, Klein provides those evaluating digital humanities with a new way of looking not just at the outcomes of scholarship (such as a single-author monograph as the gold standard in many humanities fields) but at the process leading to scholarship. She makes us understand why that process itself is a scholarly outcome. The classic scholarly monograph can report on digital humanities but it does not duplicate its actual, full, interactive, iterative, collaborative outcome.

x / Foreword

Thus, in order to judge a digital humanist, if one judges solely by the production of a scholarly monograph, one is setting the bar too low. You do not win the DARPA Grand Challenge from a blueprint of a self-driving car. You win it for building the car that actually navigates down an actual road. That is my analogy, not Klein’s. But through her astonishing breadth of knowledge, her generous assessment of so many areas of the field, Klein walks us through all of the reasons for making such a distinction as we evaluate the worth and contribution of the digital humanities.

Beyond that, Klein is suggesting, I believe, that we have entered an important moment in higher education where many of the disciplinary boundaries are not just being crossed but are being interwoven in exciting new ways. In that interweaving, digital humanities has an absolutely central place—as model, pioneer, and predecessor to many different kinds of interdisciplinary “mash-ups” yet to come.

Read this book. Share it with those who are interested in what will come next in higher education. What Julie Thompson Klein has given us here is not only a comprehensive analysis of a field. She has given us a glimpse of higher education’s future.

Acknowledgments

Every story has a beginning. This one started when Cathy Davidson called to ask if I would host a local event in a new monthly series being sponsored by the Humanities, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC). Dubbed the In/Formation Year, the series featured innovative uses of digital technologies on selected campuses. The planning team at Wayne State University decided to focus our February 2007 symposium on “Digital Partnerships in Humanities,” highlighting the University Libraries’ Digital Collections and the work of English Department faculty Steve Shaviro and Jeff Rice. As stories go, one thing led to another. . . Our event was the catalyst for a multi-year experiment in fostering Digital Humanities. I thank Walter Edwards, director of Wayne State’s Humanities Center, for a small working group grant that expanded into a faculty learning community with generous support from Sandra Yee (Dean of University Libraries), Kristi Verbeke (former assistant director of the Office for Teaching and Learning/OTL), and Nardina Namath Mein (former director of New Media and Information Technology and co-organizer of our HASTAC event). Sandy, Kristi, and Dina provided full access to the OTL and Technology Resource Center, and subsequently Dina and I became Co-PIs on a project aimed at enhancing use of the digital collections in teaching and learning. Supported by a Digital Humanities II Start-Up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project team also included web librarians Joshua Neds-Fox and Jonathan McGlone, instructional designer Anne-Marie Armstrong, and metadata librarian Adrienne Aluzzo.

I have also gained enormously from participation in Digital Humanixii / Acknowledgments ties initiatives at the University of Michigan. Daniel Herwitz, former director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, was a munificent host for two periods in residence at the institute, the first as a visiting fellow in Digital Humanities in 2008 and the second as Mellon Fellow and visiting professor of Digital Humanities in fall 2011. We were also co-chairs of the 2011 HASTAC conference hosted by the University of Michigan. Being involved in creating a new publication series has been a bountiful source of ideas as well. As co-editor of Digital Humanities@ digitalculturebooks, I spent countless hours with Tom Dwyer, acquisitions editor of the University of Michigan Press, designing the format and testing the suitability of book projects. My co-editors Tara McPherson (University of Southern California) and Paul Conway (University of Michigan) have been valued partners in this effort, and the timing was propitious. As the Press was being moved into the University of Michigan Library, I was fortunate to work closely with Shana Kimball, former head of publishing services and outreach at MPublishing and now business development manager for digital initiatives at the New York Public Library. And, I thank Aaron McCollough, Christopher Dreyer, and Andrea Olson for helping guide the final production process at the Press, as well as Kelly Witchen, Jason Colman, and Jonathan McGlone for their work on the online version and Hypothes.is platform.

This project benefited as well from the help of two research assistants. Sherry Tuffin, former student assistant in the OTL and HASTAC scholar at Wayne State, provided early database searching and copyediting. Andy Engel, a PhD candidate in English and HASTAC scholar, and now assistant professor of English at Wiley College, worked two summers as my graduate research assistant. Andy’s help with searching and managing our digital research platform, feedback on chapters, and responsibility for the “Resourcing” section made him a vital colleague, not simply an assistant. Finally, I thank Wayne State University, for providing much-needed sabbatical time at an early stage of the book’s development, as well as Anne Balsamo, Patrik Svensson, and Kate Hayles for generously sharing prepublication copies of their work. Willard McCarty also kindly granted permission to use his graphic of Methodological Interdisciplinarity. Their collegiality exemplifies the widespread spirit of cooperation in the sometimes perplexing, perpetually dynamic, and ever-evolving field of Digital Humanities.

Acknowledgments / xiii

Interdisciplining Digital Humanities is also freely available to read online (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/dh.12869322.0001.001), and it is the first scholarly monograph published by the University of Michigan Press to use the annotating and commenting tool Hypothes.is (http://hypothes .is/). This tool supports sentence-level annotations and allows for discussion at the paragraph level to enrich the reading and learning experience of others and to facilitate community peer review. You can register to use Hypothes.is at http://hypothes.is/.

Detroit, July 2014

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Contents

Introduction. Emerging 1 Interdisciplining 14

Institutionalizing 67 Professionalizing 90

Collaborating and Rewarding 135 Resourcing (by Andy Engel) 157 Print References for Chapters 1-6 173 Index 189

Introduction

Emerging

Recent coverage of the digital humanities (DH) in popular publications such as the New York Times, Nature, the Boston Globe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed has confirmed that the digital humanities is not just “the next big thing,” as the Chronicle claimed in 2009, but simply “the Thing,” as the same publication noted in 2011 (Pannapacker).

—Matthew Gold, “The Digital Humanities Moment,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew Gold (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012), ix

It would be naive to think that this boundary-breaking trajectory will happen without contestation. Moreover, practitioners in the field recall similar optimistic projections from fifteen or twenty years ago; in this respect, prognostications for rapid change have cried wolf all too often.

—N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012), 44

Keywords: interdisciplinarity, boundary work

The opening epigraphs frame an ongoing conversation about Digital Humanities (DH) as buoyed by optimism as it is laden with skepticism. Digital Humanities is a rapidly growing field at the intersections of computing and the disciplines of humanities and arts, interdisciplinary fields of culture and communication, and the professions of education and library and information science. To begin with . . . The following examples are most often associated with the term, grouped roughly by kind:

e computational linguistics and language processing + electronic text production and editing + digital collections, archives, and libraries

* computing practices in disciplines of the humanities and arts * computing practices in related interdisciplinary fields e computing practices in related professions e new objects and subjects e new methods of analysis and interpretation + cultural impacts of the Internet and new media

+ design and production + digital tools and methodologies * project and program management

+ the history and theory of Digital Humanities

+ the field’s professionalization and institutionalization

* new approaches to teaching and learning

+ changing modes of scholarly communication and publication.

As this list suggests, interest in digital technologies and new media is widespread. Not a day goes by without traffic in the blogosphere and Twitterverse announcing new developments, ranging from the first Cultural Heritage & Digital Humanities hackathon in Lithuania to a digital archive of materials about the Boston Marathon bombings. The academic press now routinely heralds new activities as well, from the local launch of an Annotation Studio or a week-long focus on DH sponsored by the library to a crowdsourced digital project in a discipline and DH-inflected sessions at its annual professional meeting. Scholarly interest has also expanded to the point the field is now anchored by a burgeoning body of publications, organizations, networks, research centers, academic programs, and funded projects. Some even believe the field is at a threshold point. At a 2008 workshop of Project Bamboo, John Unsworth declared a point of “emergence” had been reached. Project Bamboo began in early 2008 with funding from the Mellon Foundation for a planning and community design program aimed at defining scholarly practices and technological challenges. At the fourth workshop in the series, Unsworth heralded the increased number of participants and developments since work began five years earlier on a report on cyberinfrastructure for humanities. Genuine change, he quoted one participant declaring, now seemed possible. That same year, editors of the inaugural issue of the journal Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique took a step further, proclaiming Digital Humanities is now an established “inter-discipline.”

Digital Humanities is a growing international movement as well. Melissa Terrass 2011 infographic revealed large clusters of activity in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, with added presence in Africa and the Middle East. New organizations continue to emerge, including Australasian and Japanese associations for Digital Humanities. In 2009 the inaugural Digital Humanities Luxembourg Symposium took place and in 2012 the Primer Encuentro de Humanistas Digitales in Mexico City. The 2014 conference of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) took place in Lima, Peru, and in 2015 the flagship conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations will be held in Sydney, Australia. The THATCamp movement of “unconferences” also continues to spread, with events in Brazil; the Caribbean; Wellington, New Zealand; Slovakia; and Panama. Global Perspectives on Digital History brings together material from multiple sites and forums in English, German, and French. The annual online forum “Day of Digital Humanities” has expanded from English to Spanish and Portuguese. And, the Bilateral Digital Humanities Program, co-funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, supports collaborative efforts between the two countries.

Given this momentum, two figures of speech inevitably appear in the discourse of Digital Humanities—revolution and transformation. Proclamations of Humanities 2.0, University 2.0, Learning 2.0, and Web 4.0 beckon a New Academy. Mauro Carassai and Elisabet Takehana even declare “an all-encompassing ontological shift” is under way. Yet, claims of “revolution” are overstated, and the rate of change is slower than the rhetoric of “transformation” suggests. In a special issue of Daedalus on the current state of humanities, James O’Donnell also questions whether DH is a “revolution” or “only automation” (100). Writing in his blog, Stanley Katz acknowledged the “revolution” propelled by computing and information technology has begun to transform humanities, but he is equally

4 / \nterdisciplining Digital Humanities mindful of the impediments. Despite the proliferation of DH centers, Diane Zorich also cites challenges to their sustainability, infrastructure, and preservation of digital content (1-2, 37). Still other threats stem from the weakened funding climate in humanities, inflexible publication policies, lack of common standards and evaluation criteria, the limits of copyright law, uneven development across institutions, and the entire range of infrastructure needs identified in Project Bamboo and in the 2006 report of the American Council of Learning Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Our Cultural Commonwealth).

Ernesto Priego also questions uneven infrastructure across the globe. The Mexican Digital Humanities network, the Red de Humanidades Digitales, holds promise. Yet, shortages of “big money” underscore the need for innovations that use available and inexpensive technologies. Isabel Galina Russell concludes, in turn, “the full internationalization of the field has not been fully achieved,” despite notable projects in Mexico. Without a comprehensive register or documentation, they are not easy to identify. The field is also relatively unknown, and even with funding a solid infrastructure for projects is lacking, including academic recognition and sustainability and preservation. Three areas, she admonished, will be key to promoting DH in Mexico and the Latin American region: lobbying, promoting, and dissemination; training; and guidelines and aids for evaluating projects. Precedents in other countries are important, but so is understanding DH in Mexico's academic, cultural, political, and economic contexts, while also conducting research and documentation in Spanish (202-4). In an address at Mexico City in November 2013, she also concurred with Domenico Fiormonte, who questioned why the Italian Comunidad Informatica Umanistica has been largely neglected in official writing of the history of Digital Humanities.

In short, to echo Patrick Juola, an “emerging” discipline of Digital Humanities has been emerging for decades (83). In the academic world, emergence is documented formally in two classification schemes: knowledge taxonomies and organizational charts. These indicators, however, are slow to change. The National Research Council’s report on research doctorates recommended an increase in the number of interdisciplinary fields in its authoritative taxonomy. Digital Humanities, though, was not one of them (Ostriker and Kuh; Ostriker, Holland, Kuh, and Voytuk). Nor is it recognized in the 2010 U.S. Department of Education Classification of Instructional Programs, though “Digital Arts” was added to the category of Visual and Performing Arts. The field’s status is also uneven. At some universities it enjoys a high profile in the form of a research center. On other campuses, it is a small program or dispersed interests that never gain traction. Debate also continues on the field’s identity. One of the most frequent claims is that Digital Humanities is interdisciplinary, an inevitable assumption given the marriage of technology and humanities in the name. Yet, discussion is rarely informed by the voluminous literature on interdisciplinarity. This book tests the claim by examining the boundary work of the field.

Boundary work is a composite label for the claims, activities, and structures by which individuals and groups work directly and through institutions to create, maintain, break down, and reformulate between knowledge units. Boundary work studies initially focused on disciplines, especially the demarcation of science from non-science. Subsequently, though, they were extended to interdisciplinarity (Fisher, 13-17; Klein, Crossing Boundaries, 57-84). The extension was inevitable, given widespread spatial images of disciplinary borders, domains, turf, and territory. Yet, Willard McCarty cautions in mapping Humanities Computing, metaphors of boundaries, walls, and spaces depict a barrier and confinement that disguises expanding structures (Humanities Computing, 133-34). In contrast, Michael Winter highlights organic images of generation, cross-fertilization, mutation, and interrelation that compare intellectual movements to ecological processes and the evolution of new species. Spatial and organic models may even be combined, Winter suggests, to form a third type that highlights interactions between social groups and environments. The Greek word ecology (oikeo) means household or settlement. The root idea is to make and reinforce jurisdictional claims and exploit resources to produce new forms and settlements (343-46). This study is an example of the third type. It examines both spatial and organic contours of Digital Humanities in order to understand the boundary work of establishing, expanding, and sustaining a new interdisciplinary field.

The Book

Given the scope of Digital Humanities, this book is written for a wide audience. The first and largest segment is comprised of individuals and groups who work in the field, whether they identify explicitly as digital humanists or as “doing” Digital Humanities in some way. They are as diverse as a scholar in literary studies designing a digital collection centered on a single author, an anthropologist or a historian creating a computer visualization of an ancient site, a music instructor mapping sound patterns in the canon of a composer while creating an electronic music curriculum, an artist mounting a multimodal installation while involving students in its production, a professor of Italian producing a digital archive for an entire historical period while directing a humanities lab, a scholar in women’s studies doing research on the relationship of the body and technology, and a librarian building an online Digital Humanities research guide for faculty and students. To name but a few examples . . . Understanding the field’s contours will enable them to situate their activities within the larger expanse of theory and practice while sharpening their understanding of what interdisciplinarity entails. For that reason, this volume may also be used as a textbook in courses on related topics, and as a scholarly reference for funding agencies and professional organizations.

This book has an additional audience as well: scholars, teachers, and students of interdisciplinarity. Lessons from the literature on interdisciplinarity are often ignored in Digital Humanities, resulting in imprecise use of terminology and shallow understanding of theory and practice. At the same time, only by mapping situated practices can scholars of interdisciplinarity test their theories. The complex challenges of navigating interdisciplinarity in the 21st century, Jill Vickers admonishes, require ending the search for universal and timeless characteristics. We can better understand interdisciplinarity by studying how it is manifested in the contexts in which it emerges and evolves (“Diversity”). Tracing the history of another field with close ties to Digital Humanities—cultural studies— Stuart Hall also cautions that any field is situated within the political, theoretical, educational, and economic circumstances from which it arises. Projects and fields do not have simple origins. They are comprised of multiple discourses with different histories, trajectories, methodologies, and theoretical positions (“Emergence”). Digital Humanities is especially ripe for a study of its boundary work because members of the field have been quick to historicize, categorize, and institutionalize it.

In making this study of their arguments and actions, this book is itself interdisciplinary, in a triangulation of historiographical, sociological, and rhetorical methods. Historiographical analysis uncovers genealogies of origin, benchmark events, periodizations, and tensions between continuity and change. Sociological analysis examines how knowledge is codified in conditions of group membership and sanctioned practices. Rhetorical analysis dissects the claims by which people construct a field, patterns of consensus and difference, and the ways keywords and taxonomies structure hierarchies of value. These methods are not isolated. In the manner of Michel Foucault’s genealogical studies of knowledge, historiography considers how discursive objects, concepts, and strategies produce regularities, rules, and unities that are challenged by ruptures, refigurations, and transformations. In the manner of Pierre Bourdieu’s studies of the academic sphere, questions about power, conflict, and change arise in tracking the production, circulation, and institutionalization of knowledge. And, in the manner of Tony Becher’s studies of disciplinarity, tracing historical and rhetorical patterns also entails an anthropological interest in how influential figures, artifacts, and literature establish cognitive authority, reputational systems, cultural identity, and symbolism.

The integration of historical, sociological, and rhetorical perspectives is especially needed when tracking the naming of a field. “No name,” Cathy Davidson advises, “ever encompasses a field, either at its moment of inception or in its evolution over time.” Names are historical reference points that mark converging energies at particular moments. They define lacunae while demarcating what is tangential, intersectional, or orthogonal to a field (“Humanities and Technology,” 207). Given the immense variety of activities under “Big Tent Digital Humanities,” David Silver’s witty epithet is tempting: “Internet/cyberculture/digital culture/newmedia/fill-in-theblank studies” (qtd. in Gurak and Antonijevic, 497). When tallying names of another field with close links to Digital Humanities—composition studies—Armstrong and Fontaine concluded that naming entails a process of sorting and gathering, comparing and contrasting, and marking territorial relationships in political-semantic webs (7-8). Understandably, then, the same name is used for different purposes. Matthew Kirschenbaum calls DH a “mobile and tactical signifier,” deployed for particular goals such as “getting a faculty line or funding a staff position, establishing a curriculum, revamping a lab, or launching a center” (“Digital Humanities,” 415, 421).

In order to understand the complex connotations of the name, keyword clusters frame each chapter. When clustered together, Raymond Williams taught us, a particular set of words and references constitutes a field of meaning defined by their particularities and relationalities (22-25). Because individuals will be unevenly familiar with all of the field’s disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and professional parts, the chapters also include short synopses of representative developments, arguments, and practices. The focus, though, remains on interdisciplinary theory and practice. Some will wonder why another book is needed. Matthew Gold’s anthology Debates in Digital Humanities and David Berry’s Understanding Digital Humanities provide textbooks, along with the predecessor Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities. Two more recent textbooks also present an overview. Terras, Nyhan, and Vanhoutte’s 2013 Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader compiles core readings on the meaning, scope, and implementation of this field, with commentaries by the editors and authors, an annotated bibliography, and sample postings and analysis of the definitional exercise “Day of Digital Humanities.” Aimed at non-specialists, Gold’s forthcoming DH: A Short Introduction to the Digital Humanities will present a broad historical picture from antecedents to recent expansion and future directions. Warwick, Terras, and Nyhan’s Digital Humanities in Practice is a practical guide to key topics for academic and cultural heritage audiences, with bibliographies. And, Burdick and colleagues’ Digital_Humanities includes synthetic mappings, emerging methods and genres, case studies, along with a short guide. However, none of these and other publications interrogates the claim of being “interdisciplinary.”

Chapter 1: Interdisciplining

Keywords: Multidisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity, Transdisciplinarity, interprofessionalism, Methodological versus Theoretical ID, Instrumental versus Critical ID, interdisciplinary humanities, cross-hatching, travel, identity, transversality

Any book that places interdisciplinarity at its heart begs an overriding question: what does this ubiquitous word mean? In order to foster more informed use of terminology, chapter 1 presents a baseline vocabulary of the three most common terms—multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity, supplemented by a fourth term, interprofessionalism. It situates Digital Humanities within the baseline while elaborating on differences between Methodological and Theoretical forms of interdisciplinarity as well as Instrumental and Critical forms. It then places DH within the larger history of interdisciplinarity in humanities while considering the roles of disciplinary change, increased crossing of boundaries between humanities and social sciences, the cross-hatching of new developments, and the mobility of concepts. The chapter closes by drawing insights from other interdisciplinary fields about their identity and transversal intersections.

Chapter 2: Defining

Keywords: Humanities Computing, Digital Humanities, discipline, interdiscipline, modes of engagement, 2.0 interactivity, visualization, spatialization, code

The English word definition derives from the Latin définitién-em, referring to both a statement of the meaning of a word and the act of setting bounds or limits of explanation. Rafael Alvarado contends “there is no definition of digital humanities,” if that means “agreement on theory, methods, professional norms, and criteria of evaluation.” Instead, he posits “a genealogy, a network of family resemblances among provisional schools of thought, methodological interests, and preferred tools” (50-51). Closer analysis of six statements opens a more nuanced picture of how the field has been defined across nearly sixty-five years of work, comparing both resemblances and differences. The chapter then contextualizes Digital Humanities within three major disciplines where digital technologies and new media are changing the nature of practice—English, history, and archaeology. It concludes by weighing the significance of three themes that have emerged in the field’s recent history—visualization, spatialization, and a computational turn in culture.

Chapter 3: Institutionalizing

Keywords: institutionalization, critical mass, overt versus concealed interdisciplinarity, location, migration, leveraging, partnership, infrastructure

Institutionalization is a process of establishing something within an organization or a social sphere, whether it is an idea, such as democracy, or an occupation, such as teaching. Categories of knowledge are also institutions, Steven Shapin suggests, not in the conventional sense of buildings and structures but a set of marks constructed and maintained in cultural space (355). Chapter 3 initiates a three-part exploration of how the category of Digital Humanities is located within the cultural space of the academy, through institutionalizing, professionalizing, and educating. It begins by providing a conceptual framework for thinking about institutionalization of interdisciplinarity. It then identifies patterns of affiliation of scholars and educators in the field, followed by an examination of the most prestigious structure, research centers, and closing reflection on the challenge of sustainability.