I follow William Pannapacker on twitter, and I was incredibly intrigued when I saw the title of his latest story: “Stop Calling it ‘Digital Humanities'”. Pannapacker’s controversial title did its work and drew me in, yet as I read through his 9 point plan for the Digital Humanities, I found my initial skepticism softening. Pannapacker’s article provides solid, tangible suggestions for ways that academics can bring the Digital Humanities to their institutions and firmly ensconce these new meta- and interdisciplinary efforts in higher education. And, arguably, many of the ideas Pannapacker suggests will pave the way for institutions of higher education to see the Humanities as scholarly pursuits that have the ability to evolve and change with new technologies and modes of discovery, which means that when the next generation of something like DH comes around, hopefully departments and scholars will have an easier time convincing their administrations of its pertinence.

What I still cannot get over is Pannapacker’s lead in: that changing the name of the Digital Humanities to the Digital Liberal Arts will somehow make scholars from other disciplines see it as less exclusive and “elitist”. I do not disagree with Pannapacker that this might be how others view DH, but it seems to me that the Digital Liberal Arts are going to have the same problem eventually. I think that in his suggestion of a title change that Pannapacker hits on something inherently problematic to the field of the Digital Humanities but that his cosmetic solution (point 1 of 9) is a superficial answer. I think that this comes down to the same problem our group had on Day 1, which is answering the question: “What is the Digital Humanities?”. Sure, if all humanists spin DH as is digital archives, then why would scholars other than humanists care about it? But through the technologies we are engaging with in this certification course: GIS Mapping, Text Encoding, Data Mining, Collaborative blogging etc. I just simply do not see how DH can be an exclusive Old Humanists Club. DH demands that humanists build bridges across campuses and interact with scholars in other fields. It asks scholars to ponder how someone else in another department might understand and benefit their project, which in my mind is the first step in breaking down academic work barriers. I think that what needs to happen, along with Pannapacker’s 8 other positive suggestions, is for DH scholars to really utilize these technologies in all aspects of their academic life. If we can get the scholarly community and students both recognizing that DH goes beyond scanning documents to make them accessible to more people on the internet, then subsequent scholars will see how DH really combines fields and disciplines to increase accessibility to academic work. Because, ultimately, just as I might need the computer scientist to build me a blogging platform, the computer scientist also needs my work in order to show off his/her designs.