The digital humanist: Contested status within contesting futures

Abstract

The fluctuating role and status of digital humanists—for example as adjunct technicians, hybrid cross-disciplinary scholars, para-academics, or so-called Alt-Acs—is not solely contingent on disciplinary challenges in the academy. Uncontrollable external factors such as economic instability, political change, and technological disruption can radically change and redefine roles and career trajectories. Therefore, the possibility of having to deal with the consequences of not just constant change but also potentially massively disruptive upheaval needs to be considered seriously on an ongoing basis. To avoid, or mitigate, the destructive aspects of such destabilizing change to the Digital Humanities we apply the futurity technique of scenario analysis. In this analysis, we develop and explore four plausible, contesting, but not mutually exclusive, potential futures and ask three fundamental questions to inform future organizational designs and development plans: What could happen? What would be the impact? What needs to be done to be ready and able to respond effectively (to all scenarios)? We conclude that, to remain relevant and resilient in a world constantly threatened by disruption, the Digital Humanities should adopt more flexible and less hierarchical divisions, open processes, and policies, and embrace flatter organizational structures, incorporating extended and inter-operable networks of communities, sources, and technologies, while employing a blended basket of criteria that will prevent identified schisms from becoming dangerous chasms.

Digital humanities: Mission accomplished? An analysis of scholarly literature

“…This position can be compared to that maintained by Turbanti (2023). Papadopoulos and Reilly (2020) say that DH has become a collage of disciplines, including several fields pertaining to social sciences.…”

“…He also treats the supposed revolution in the context of his vision of interdisciplinarity, which is perhaps the main transformative aspect in the recent history of the humanities (McCarty, 2016). Papadopoulos and Reilly (2020) identify the old paradigm as 'the time-honoured heroic paradigm in which curiosity-driven, professional singleton scholars are privileged but securely tethered by tenure and scholarly tradition to an academy', and, 'At the far end of DH practice, we imagine an environment of knowledge pluralism engendered by promiscuous crowds of independent knowledge workers operating under an open, and overtly socially inclusive, ethos.' Regarding the new paradigm, however, they complain about 'knowledge workers … more or less unaffiliated, and thus unfettered by traditional career paths and ties to specific institutions, working on short-term contracts with no expectation of career progression within the contracting organization'.…”

Ain’t No Way Around It: Why We Need to Be Clear About What We Mean by “Digital Humanities”

“…for the query "digital humanities will become just humanities" conference, which had just taken place July 9-12, 2019, in Utrecht. The discussions also at least hinted at a certain dissatisfaction with mainstream DH, having "the impression that most work that is more technically/statistically/computationally involved can't find its place (in DH journals or conferences)," 8 while Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, the flagship journal of DH accepts and publishes articles rambling about the "Paraversity of Digital Agency" (Papadopoulos & Reilly, 2020).…”

Revisiting Connotations of Digital Humanists: Exploratory Interviews

“…In addition to the roles of DH among academic fields, Ma and Li (2022) also demonstrated that humanities and STEM researchers, among others, further shape the DH community with their respective, sometimes competing, research conventions as well as cross-field research collaborations. Empirical works focusing on DH intellectual structures, disciplinary compositions, and collaboration also suggest an increasingly complex picture of DH workforce (Antonijević, 2015;Fiormonte et al, 2015;Griffin & Hayler, 2018;Papadopoulos & Reilly, 2020).…”