It's an important question - one that I think is going to inform a great deal of what we do in edu, higher and otherwise, more and more with each passing year. There are so many interrelated issues and considerations around the umbrella term "digital humanities," it's hard to know where to begin - my apologies if I'm a bit scattered! Hopefully there'll be at least a few nuggets you'll find useful to ponder, or to foster critical discussion.
My colleague asked: "in a word - what's your opinion? Yea or nay, and why?" My answer in a word: yea. I'm someone who sees DH as an opportunity to expand the relevance of the humanities and liberal arts - its values, the habits of mind it cultivates - into an important (and growing) aspect of the contemporary human experience.
Think of how long, and in how many different contexts, we've seen tension between the "pure" practice of the liberal arts and the "public intellectual" model. There's a sense in which the current dialogue over DH is another iteration of that longstanding back-and-forth: how far should we reach out into our students' world of what's happening now, and how much should we insist that they step out of that context and realize the ahistorical, noncontextual values the academy has traditionally endorsed? The liberal arts have a centuries-long tradition, and have stood the test of time. If we change what we do based on technology - especially given the amazingly rapid development of technology - do we risk becoming merely reactive, perpetually playing catch-up to an ever-changing set of technical skills?
Perhaps as importantly, there's a fair concern over the industry-driven nature of technology: even in something as seemingly innocuous as word-processing, the choice of our tech tools bears broad ethical consequences, committing us as individual researchers and teachers, and as institutions, to supporting particular companies/industries. ...Unless we're fortunate enough to be at an institution which has committed to #opensource / #oer resources: but, at least at present, this is a rather tiny (if growing) sliver of the pie!
In another (but related) sense, the humanities' concern over adopting tech is often about self-preservation: the more we admit that tech use is a crucial skill for students to succeed in their lives, the more we admit that it's a viable competitor for the skills we teach! Many see this challenge, and are not sure how to respond: should we "admit defeat", and shift what we do to a model of career training? If not, what's left? stridently and shrilly maintain the value of our traditional liberal arts skills as a counterpoint to those "merely technical" skills - and hope that we can keep attracting students on an "us-vs-them" rhetorical model?
I consider it a misguided tactic to respond to the challenge of technology, and the value of technological skills, by setting up the liberal arts and humanities as a competing "track" or set of skills or aims. If we're serious when we say that the liberal arts represent a way of thinking which is broadly applicable to human lives, regardless of particular role, or career, we have a certain responsibility to support that claim, yes? We perhaps ought to be ready to show our students, and our societies, that being a humanist is fully compatible, and seamlessly integratable [horrible neologism], with being a technologist. And, we ought equally to be ready to show that technologists benefit in authentic ways from the humanities: it's already clear that we humanists are deriving measurable benefits from technology!
In the particular context of the small liberal arts college, one thing that springs to mind is an important footnote to the prevailing public conversation: we are not all using technology to "scale" - no MOOCs here! Our local interactions with technology are very much about improving and streamlining and enhancing the direct, personal connections between faculty and students which have always been at the heart of the small liberal arts college model. While there are certainly very real pressures (especially on larger universities) to use edtech as an expansion tool (with all the issues of justice that entails: labor issues, access issues...), we're focusing on translating the valuable pieces of our small-scale educational practice into methods that use technology as supportive, rather than intrusive.
From the point of view of humanities scholarship and research (which, granted, is not a hugely significant piece of what we do at my institution), DH is fascinatingly rich, not only for the sorts of new research methods it makes available to traditional projects, but for the new areas of research it opens up to traditional methods. I'm going to be at the Digital Classics Association conference in April, where colleagues will be presenting on issues of stylometric text analysis, mapping antiquity, linguistic annotation, citation, and intertextuality - traditional humanistic research interests, but now capable of incredibly robust analysis, visualization, and interpretation, on the basis of powerful aggregation and comparison of data which would have taken lifetimes of individual, manual scholarly effort. On the other hand, there are fascinating sociological, psychological, ethical, anthropological areas of inquiry around our use of, and relations with, our evolving technology, which are ripe for (and already giving rise to) serious scholarly work.
Faculty at every institution of education need to be having this conversation. Because if we don't, we cede the field: we tacitly abdicate our claim of relevance to a whole swath of human life in the 21st century. And that, if anything, is exactly the opposite of what I, at least, believe to be true.
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