How has DH changed over the years and what does it entail?

As difficult as it is to newcomers to accept the fact that the Digital Humanities lacks a firm definition (a student rightly asked for one again at the end of the class), we can easily see its evolution -so to speak- of our approaches to doing or practicing DH. Since we are going to be reading recent articles and they often mention past debates or issues, I wanted to give a quick preview of how we have all shaped DH to what it currently does.

For students to learn about the last 10ish years or so of the digital humanities in, mostly, the United States, I assigned each of them one of the introductions to Debates in Digital Humanities from 2012 to 2023. They were then in charge of a brief discussion, so they identified a few keywords and ideas, and brought up questions. Let me summarize a bit per year:

• 2012: “The Big Tent” metaphor was of course something that stood out but also the mention of the coding or not coding debate and move towards making and building; accessibility; Is DH saving the Humanities?; Twitter; turn to inclusivity; and the semi-public peer review of the book.
• 2016: Move from “big tent” to an expanded field noting that the big tent metaphor itself seemed a bit US/Anglo-centric; the division of the articles; and the decentralization of DH acknowledging our influence on other fields and how other fields influence DH.
• 2019: DH as vectors; a request for accountability and empathy in our practices; focus on the present times.
• 2023: Focus on the moment to recalibrate the sense of the future, asking ourselves how DH matters beyond itself; social justice in DH; more collaboration with ethical implications.

We had a wonderful conversation about all that they found interesting while they made connections from one year to another themselves. This navigation through the years gave them a good sense of where we are at now, the type of further readings we will cover in class during the semester and the care they have to show on their project(s). How are they going to “take action in the present” in drafting their project documentation? How can they apply these notions and methods in their home disciplines?

In order for them to see the variety and diversity of approaches of DH to scholarship in the present moment, the following day we discussed Programming Historian and Reviews in DH as two resources in which they can see DH in action. They loved both journals! They had some questions about how the reviews are done in Reviews, which I kindly explained, and offered a few suggestions for PH after reading:

• Sichani A-M, Baker J, Afanador-Llach MJ and Walsh B, “Diversity and inclusion in digital scholarship and pedagogy: the case of The Programming Historian,” Insights, 2019, 32: 16, 1–6;
• Isasi et al. “A Model for Multilingual and Multicultural Digital Scholarship Methods Publishing: The Case of Programming Historian,” in Multilingual Digital Humanities ed. by L. Violla and P. Spence, Routledge, 2023: 17-30.

In the following days, they have to search for project examples that are related to our readings and each student will chose and teach a workshop from Programming Historian, with a low-tech approach first.

Some food for thought for all of us, left by a student, more or less like this: “So how is everyone going to participate in DH and these debates and methods and practices if all these books (on Debates) are in English only?”