More digital than thou by Michael Sperberg-McQueen.
From the post:
An odd thing has started happening in reviews for the Digital Humanities conference: reviewers are objecting to papers if the reviewer thinks it has relevance beyond the field of DH, apparently on the grounds that the topic is then insufficiently digital. It doesn’t matter how relevant the topic is to work in DH, or how deeply embedded the topic is in a core DH topic like text encoding — if some reviewers don’t see a computer in the proposal, they want to exclude it from the conference.
Michael’s focus on the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), XML Schema at the W3C, and other projects, kept him from seeing the ramparts being thrown up around digital humanities.
Well, and Michael is just Michael. Whether you are a long time XML hacker or a new comer, Michael is just Michael. When you are really good, you don’t need to cloak yourself in disciplinary robes, boundaries and secret handshakes.
You don’t have to look far in the “digital humanities” to find forums where hand wringing over the discipline of digital humanities is a regular feature. As opposed to concern over what digital technologies have, can, will contribute to the humanities.
Digital technologies should be as much a part of each humanities discipline as the more traditional periodical indexes, concordances, dictionaries and monographs.
After all, I thought there was general agreement that “separate but equal” was a poor policy.