The Bonfire of the (Digital) Humanities

Digital humanities came close to imploding as an organized discipline in the 2015– 2016 academic year. The origins of the dispute lay in the deliberations of the program committee for Digital Humanities, the annual, usually very competitive, international conference organized by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and held in 2016 in Krakow, Poland. What criteria, this committee asked itself, should we use for accepting or rejecting submissions? Should we privilege “quality”— presumably as this is measured by success in the conference's traditionally highly structured and quite thorough peer review process? Or should we privilege “diversity”— defined largely in terms of ensuring that speakers from as wide a range of demographics as possible are given slots at a conference (and in a discipline) that has been accused of skewing heavily toward white, Northern, and Anglophone men? Or, as one member of the committee put it with forceful clarity in an email:

Email is an informal medium, and it would be unfair to take the position expressed here and later circulated by others on social media as having been considered in the same way as this chapter or other formal presentations that have referred to this email since this controversy first arose. As Steven Ramsay has noted of his own apparently unintentionally provocative comments on the belief that coding is the core activity within digital humanities, “All quotes are by nature taken out of context.”