Sarah E. Bond, Hoyt Long, and Ted Underwood:

ver the past 15 years, the humanities have undergone dizzying changes. Scholars are now blogging, learning to code, writing collaboratively, and mining vast digital libraries. Many of these changes are bound up with computers, and observers often characterize them collectively as “digital humanities.” But so far, digital humanities hasn’t become a separate field or even a distinct school of thought. The term is a loose label for a series of social and intellectual changes taking place in humanistic disciplines.

Disciplinary change is always controversial, and the attack on DH has become a recognized genre. Timothy Brennan’s recent article, “The Digital-Humanities Bust,” is the latest of these pieces. What troubles him about DH, he says, is that it harbors “an epistemology.”

Brennan is willing to accept that computers can help with strictly linguistic problems: “compiling concordances,” for example, or “deciphering Mayan stelae.” But he dismisses the idea that they can help address the core questions of the humanities. He writes: