What both the religious and digital visions offer (if only in prospect) is a steady yet dynamic state where there is movement and change, but no center, no beginning and end, just all middle

Fitzpatrick contends, first, that authorship has never been thus isolated — one always writes against the background of, and in conversation with, innumerable predecessors and contemporaries who are in effect one’s collaborators — and, second, that the “myth” of the stand-alone, masterful author is exposed for the fiction it is by the new forms of communication — blogs, links, hypertext, re-mixes, mash-ups, multi-modalities and much more — that have emerged with the development of digital technology.

a blog privileges immediacy — the newest posts appear first on the screen and older posts quickly lose currency….

This is a blog. There, I’ve said it. I have been resisting saying it — I have always referred to this space as a “column” — not only because “blog” is an ugly word (as are clog, smog and slog), but because blogs are provisional, ephemeral, interactive, communal, available to challenge, interruption and interpolation, and not meant to last; whereas in a professional life now going into its 50th year I have been building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive and, most important, all mine.

He can talk all he wants about being a bricoleur, but we can see the grease under his fingernails. That is true of every “big name” I can think of in dh.

Alan Liu

Only a radical subset of the dh community knows how to code; nearly all are engaged in building something.

Learn to code because it’s fun and because it will change the way you look at the world. Then notice that we could substitute any other subject for “learn to code” in that sentence.

Almost everyone in Digital Humanities was taught to do this and loves to do this. But making a map (with a gis system, say) is an entirely different experience. dh-ers insist — again and again — that this process of creation yields insights that are difficult to acquire otherwise. It’s the thing I’ve been hearing for as I long as I’ve been in this. People who mark up texts say it, as do those who build software, hack social networks, create visualizations, and pursue the dozens of other forms of haptic engagement that bring dh-ers to the same table.

who bid participation

And that commonality, I think, involves moving from reading and critiquing to building and making.

But if you are not making anything, you are not — in my less-than-three-minute opinion — a digital humanist.

I also think the discipline includes and should include people who theorize about building, people who design so that others might build, and those who supervise building (the coding question is, for me, a canard, insofar as many people build without knowing how to program).

Maybe that means Yale’s dh ambitions will never get off the ground. Or maybe Yale is powerful enough to redefine the mission of those institutions with respect to the Humanities.

Nowadays, the term can mean anything from media studies to electronic art, from data mining to edutech, from scholarly editing to anarchic blogging, while inviting code junkies, digital artists, standards wonks, transhumanists, game theorists, free culture advocates, archivists, librarians, and edupunks under its capacious canvas.

Or decided that Digital Humanities is what we used to call New Media Studies

Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of digital humanities and I say “yes.”

It is a series of concrete instantiations involving money, students, funding agencies, big schools, little schools, programs, curricula, old guards, new guards, gatekeepers, and prestige.