I have said a few controversial things over the course of my career, and it seems to me that if you are so honored as to have other people talking about what you said, you should probably sit back and let people respond without trying to defend yourself against every countercharge.

But I am worried that my late remarks at MLA 11 are touching a nerve in a way that is not provocative (in the good sense), but blithely exclusionary. The particular remarks are as follows:

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

“Personally, I think Digital Humanities is about building things [. . .] If you are not making anything, you are not . . . a digital humanist.”

I suppose I could say that both of those quotes are taken out of context, but given that all quotes are by nature taken out of context, it does not seem exactly fair to protest. But just stating things like this (as I soon discovered) really does touch upon a number of anxieties both in Digital Humanities (DH) and among those who bid participation. I do not know if I can alleviate that anxiety. I am not even sure that I want to, insofar as some anxieties can be oddly productive. But there is a lot more to be said here.

I have had the pleasure of talking with lots and lots of people in DH from among a wide range of disciplines. And I have been having that conversation since the mid-nineties. I have discovered that there are lots of things that distinguish an historian from, say, a literary critic or a philosopher, and there are a lot of differences between 1995 and 2011. But to me, there has always been a profound — and profoundly exciting and enabling — commonality to everyone who finds their way to DH. And that commonality, I think, involves moving from reading and critiquing to building and making.”

Excerpt from http://lenz.unl.edu/wordpress/

By Steve Ramsay