Peter Robinson, Digital Humanities. Is Bigger, Better?
The history of what we now call `digital humanities' is brief. The term itself is little over a decade old, replacing the earlier `humanities computing', only in currency from the 1960s.1 The novelty of the concept is such that the scope of the term `digital humanities' is very much the subject of debate. Is it a discipline? Or is it a collection of people who consider themselves part of a community---and how is that community defined? But we can agree on this: digital humanities, whatever it is, is much bigger than it was some 30 years ago, and there are many more digital humanists (whatever they are) than there were 30 years ago. Key to the growth of the digital humanities in the last two decades has been the flourishing and well-funded existence of digital humanities centres, predominantly in North America and Europe. Yet, it did not, and does not, have to be that way. I argue in this chapter that this foundation of the growth in the digital humanities in comparatively few centres was the product of a set of circumstances specific to the needs and possibilities of the time. I argue further that, two decades on, the landscape has altered so radically that we now face a different set of imperatives and possibilities. The model of digital humanities centres nourished by substantial funding has served us well, but (at the least) requires radical adaptation to meet the challenges now pressing on us.
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