¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 The breadth and depth of the list of workshops for this year’s NYC DH Week articulates one of the first questions this class addressed last semester: “digital humanities: singular or plural?” Not only were the workshops on established fields like digital editions but there were also ones on emerging fields like physical computing and (in the age of the surveillance state and now Trump) information security. The digital humanities do seem increasingly plural. Kathleen Fitzpatrick addressed this question herself in the 2012 edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities when she argued that we can best navigate the “creative tension[s]” in the field by letting the field “remain plural” (Fitzpatrick).

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 More importantly, however, for the purposes of this semester’s class, NYC DH Week displayed an overwhelming amount of skills to learn, or decide not to learn, in order to work within the field. While revising my proposal, for example, I tried to limit the deliverables to those that required proficiency in skills with which I’m most comfortable like project management and front-end development. This proved almost impossible—any nontrivial digital humanities project requires the individual devising it to delve into unknown territories (databases and outreach campaigns in my case). This, in turn, introduces us, as graduate students, to a collaborative type of academic labor that remains both ad hoc and committed to a singular goal. It is collaborative because no one individual can master all the skills required to deliver a project. It is ad hoc because the individuals collaborating on the project must decide who will learn which required skill to which level of proficiency. Yet it also remains committed to the singular goal of the project itself. This labor ultimately breaks with the scholar-in-the-library vision we often associate with the humanities, and it seems to demonstrate the plural nature of the digital humanities themselves.

Work Cited

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “The Humanities, Done Digitally.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, U of Minnesota P, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/30.