ABSTRACT
It was at the MLA's annual convention in 2009 that the digital humanities first came to the attention of a wider academic and general public and was hailed as the next big thing. Four years later, the annual meeting in Boston in January 2013 offered something like 66 sessions on the digital humanities, panels and workshops “that in some way address the influence and impact of digital materials and tools upon language, literary, textual, and media studies, as well as upon online pedagogy and scholarly communication,” as Mark Sample put it in his annually compiled list, roughly 8 percent of the total sessions at the massive event. 1 One of the best attended and widely reported was a session on “The Dark Side of Digital Humanities,” which explored issues of labor, institutional power, corporatism and instrumentalism around the rise of the digital humanities, and considered DH from the point of view of university administrators and trustees as much as practitioners themselves. The session's description called on participants to offer “models of digital humanities that are not rooted in technocratic rationality or neoliberal economic calculus.” The implication may have been that DH could be particularly complicit in that regard, more so than, say, English or comparative literature, given its central reliance on digital technology, but also, perhaps, its self-definition as a set of practices, which are theoretically applicable to many ends. In the event, however, a portion of the talks and most of the discussion afterward turned out to be about the then-timely topic of the impact of MOOCs on the humanities, courses that many in the digital humanities community had been critiquing online for months before the convention as not really innovative, not really “DH” enough. Not everything academic with “digital” in it is automatically the result of DH, in other words, and the distinctions are, perhaps, more important the closer one is to the making and doing under consideration. Digital humanities sessions at the MLA in Boston were, in general, well attended, 179and for another year of several in a row, now, produced the most lively back-channel discussions on Twitter. Among the 66 were a diverse range of approaches and topics, including some that addressed issues such as those highlighted in the Dark Side panel, but one underlying issue went mostly unspoken: the assumption that what's politically and institutionally questionable about digital humanities is its practical orientation—an assumption potentially reinforced every time DH is defined as “a set of practices.” It's true that, in the DH list of MLA sessions, the word “practice” appears 12 times, with 5 of the occurrences coming in session titles. (Searching the MLA program as a whole turns up only a few additional instances of the word beyond the DH sessions).
