The Promise of the Digital Humanities and the Contested Nature of Digital Scholarship

Numerous recent reports have addressed the state of the humanities, but none has explored the ways in which the digital humanities have expanded and opened up possibilities in the modes of scholarly production. This chapter examines the contested nature of scholarship between the disciplines and the digital humanities and within the digital humanities. It argues that between 1993 and 2013 the digital humanities led a widespread effort to repurpose the humanities for the digital age, where scholarship would take place not in the traditional formats but in the open digital environment. Despite the accomplishments of this twenty-year surge in the digital humanities, this chapter proposes ways to organize, review, and critique digital scholarship.