PART I ][ Chapter 1
第一部分 ][ 第一章

What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?
数字人文学科是什么，它在英语系中做什么？

MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM

What is (or are) the “digital humanities” (DH), also known as “humanities computing”? It’s tempting to say that whoever asks the question has not gone looking very hard for an answer. “What is digital humanities?” essays like this one are already genre pieces. Willard McCarty has been contributing papers on the subject for years (a monograph, too). Under the earlier appellation, John Unsworth has advised us on “What Is Humanities Computing and What Is Not.” Most recently Patrik Svensson has been publishing a series of well-documented articles on multiple aspects of the topic, including the lexical shift from humanities computing to digital humanities. Moreover, as Cynthia Selfe in an ADE Bulletin from 1988 reminds us, computers have been part of our disciplinary lives for well over two decades now. During this time digital humanities has accumulated a robust professional apparatus that is probably more rooted in English than any other departmental home.
什么是“数字人文学科”（DH），也被称为“人文学科计算”？说出这个问题的人可能没有认真寻找答案。“什么是数字人文学科？”这样的文章已经成为一种体裁。威拉德·麦卡提多年来一直在这个主题上发表论文（还有一本专著）。在早期的称谓下，约翰·安斯沃斯曾建议我们了解“什么是人文学科计算，什么不是”。最近，帕特里克·斯文森发表了一系列关于该主题多个方面的文献详实的文章，包括从人文学科计算到数字人文学科的词汇转变。此外，正如辛西娅·塞尔夫在 1988 年的一篇ADE Bulletin中提醒我们的，计算机在我们的学科生活中已经存在了超过二十年。在这段时间里，数字人文学科积累了一个强大的专业体系，这个体系可能比其他任何学科更扎根于英语。

The contours of this professional apparatus are easily discoverable. An organization called the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations hosts a well-attended annual international conference called Digital Humanities. (It grew out of an earlier annual series of conferences, hosted jointly by the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing since 1989.) There is Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities. There is a book series (yes, a book series), Topics in the Digital Humanities, from the University of Illinois Press. There is a refereed journal called Digital Humanities Quarterly, one of several that serve the field, including a newer publication, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, sponsored by the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities (Société pour l’Étude des Médias Interactifs). The University of Victoria hosts the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute to train new scholars. Crucially, there are digital humanities centers and institutes (probably at least one hundred worldwide, some of them established for a decade or more with staffs numbering in the dozens); these are served by an organization known as centerNet. There have been digital humanities manifestos (I know of at least two) and FAQs, colloquia and symposia, and workshops and special sessions. Not to mention, of course, that a gloss or explanation of digital humanities is implicit in every mission statement, every call for papers and proposals, every strategic plan and curriculum development document, every hiring request, and so forth that invokes the term. Or the countless times the question has been visited on electronic discussion lists, blogs, Facebook walls, and Twitter feeds, contributing all the flames and exhortations, celebrations, and screeds one could wish to read.
这个专业设备的轮廓很容易被发现。一个名为数字人文学科组织联盟的组织主办了一年一度的国际会议，称为数字人文学科。（它源于 1989 年由计算机与人文学科协会和文学与语言计算协会共同主办的早期年度系列会议。）有黑威尔的数字人文学科指南。还有一本书系列（是的，一本书系列），名为数字人文学科中的主题，由伊利诺伊大学出版社出版。还有一本经过审稿的期刊，名为数字人文学科季刊，这是服务于该领域的几本期刊之一，包括一本较新的出版物，数字研究/数字领域，由加拿大数字人文学会（Société pour l’Étude des Médias Interactifs）赞助。维多利亚大学主办年度数字人文学科夏季学院，以培训新学者。 至关重要的是，全球有数字人文学科中心和研究所（可能至少有一百个，其中一些成立已有十年或更久，员工人数达数十人）；这些中心由一个名为 centerNet 的组织提供服务。已经有数字人文学科宣言（我知道至少有两个）和常见问题解答、研讨会和座谈会，以及工作坊和特别会议。当然，数字人文学科的解释或说明在每个使命声明、每个征稿和提案的呼吁、每个战略计划和课程开发文件、每个招聘请求等中都是隐含的，凡是提到该术语的地方。或者在电子讨论列表、博客、Facebook 墙和 Twitter 动态上无数次被提及，贡献了所有人们希望阅读的火焰、劝诫、庆祝和长篇大论。

We could also, of course, simply Google the question. Google takes us to Wikipedia, and what we find there is not bad:
我们当然也可以简单地在谷歌上搜索这个问题。谷歌会带我们去维基百科，而我们在那里找到的内容还不错：

As a working definition this serves as well as any I’ve seen, which is not surprising since a glance at the page’s view history tab reveals individuals closely associated with the digital humanities as contributors. At its core, then, digital humanities is more akin to a common methodological outlook than an investment in any one specific set of texts or even technologies. We could attempt to refine this outlook quantitatively, using some of the very tools and techniques digital humanities has pioneered. For example, we might use a text analysis tool named Voyeur developed by Stéfan Sinclair to mine the proceedings from the annual Digital Humanities conference and develop lists of topic frequencies or collocate key terms or visualize the papers’ citation networks. We could also choose to explore the question qualitatively by examining sets of projects from self-identified digital humanities centers. At the University of Maryland, where I serve as an associate director at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, we support work from “Shakespeare to Second Life,” as we’re fond of saying: the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, funded by a joint grant program administered by the United Kingdom’s Joint Information Systems Committee and the National Endowment for the Humanities, makes a searchable digital facsimile of each of the thirty-two extant quarto copies of Hamlet available online, while Preserving Virtual Worlds, a project supported by the Library of Congress, has developed and tested standards and best practices for archiving and ensuring future access to computer games, interactive fiction, and virtual communities.
作为一个工作定义，这个定义和我见过的任何一个一样有效，这并不令人惊讶，因为查看页面的查看历史标签可以发现与数字人文学科密切相关的个人作为贡献者。因此，从本质上讲，数字人文学科更像是一种共同的方法论视角，而不是对任何特定文本或技术的投资。我们可以尝试定量地细化这种视角，使用一些数字人文学科所开创的工具和技术。例如，我们可以使用由 Stéfan Sinclair 开发的名为 Voyeur 的文本分析工具，挖掘年度数字人文学科会议的会议记录，并开发主题频率列表或关联关键术语，或可视化论文的引用网络。我们也可以选择通过检查自我认定的数字人文学科中心的项目集来定性地探讨这个问题。 在马里兰大学，我担任马里兰人文学科技术研究所的副主任，我们支持从“莎士比亚到第二人生”的工作，正如我们所喜欢说的那样：莎士比亚四开本档案，由英国联合信息系统委员会和国家人文学科基金会共同管理的资助项目资助，提供每一份现存的三十二份《哈姆雷特》四开本的可搜索数字复制品在线，而“保护虚拟世界”项目则得到了国会图书馆的支持，开发并测试了归档和确保未来访问计算机游戏、互动小说和虚拟社区的标准和最佳实践。

Yet digital humanities is also a social undertaking. It harbors networks of people who have been working together, sharing research, arguing, competing, and collaborating for many years. Key achievements from this community, like the Text Encoding Initiative or the Orlando Project, were mostly finished before the current wave of interest in digital humanities began. Nonetheless, the rapid and remarkable rise of digital humanities as a term can be traced to a set of surprisingly specific circumstances. Unsworth, who was the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia for a decade and is currently dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, has this to relate:
然而，数字人文学科也是一项社会事业。它汇聚了许多多年来共同工作、分享研究、争论、竞争和合作的人们网络。这个社区的关键成就，如文本编码倡议或奥兰多项目，在当前对数字人文学科的兴趣浪潮开始之前大多已经完成。尽管如此，数字人文学科作为一个术语的快速而显著的崛起可以追溯到一系列令人惊讶的具体情况。安斯沃斯曾是弗吉尼亚大学人文学科高级技术研究所的创始主任，担任了十年，目前是伊利诺伊大学图书馆与信息科学研究生院的院长，他对此有这样的看法：

At about the same time that Blackwell’s volume was being put together, the leadership of two scholarly organizations opened discussions about creating an umbrella entity for themselves and eventually other organizations and associations with like interests. As anyone who has ever tried to run a scholarly organization will know, economies of scale are difficult to come by with only a few hundred members, and so the thought was to consolidate and share infrastructure and services. The two organizations were the aforementioned Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC). The umbrella structure that resulted was called ADHO, or the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Here is Unsworth again from the same communication: “Conversations about merging ACH and ALLC began at Tuebingen, in a bar, in a conversation between Harold Short and me, in July 2002. A couple of months later, I had set a list called ‘adhoc’—allied digital humanities organizations committee, first message dated August 16, 2002…. We finally got things off the dime in Sweden, at the 2004 ALLC/ACH, and after waffling some more about names (ICHIO, OHCO, and others) we voted, in April of 2005, to go with ADHO, changing ‘A’ from ‘Allied’ to ‘Alliance.’”³
在黑威尔的著作整理的同时，两个学术组织的领导层开始讨论为自己以及最终其他有相似兴趣的组织和协会创建一个伞形实体。任何曾经尝试运营学术组织的人都知道，只有几百名成员时，规模经济是很难实现的，因此想法是整合和共享基础设施和服务。这两个组织是前面提到的计算机与人文学科协会（ACH）和文学与语言计算协会（ALLC）。最终形成的伞形结构被称为 ADHO，即数字人文学科组织联盟。以下是安斯沃斯在同一通讯中的话：“关于合并 ACH 和 ALLC 的对话始于 2002 年 7 月，在图宾根的一家酒吧，哈罗德·肖特和我之间的对话。几个月后，我设立了一个名为‘adhoc’的列表——盟友数字人文学科组织委员会，第一条消息的日期是 2002 年 8 月 16 日…… 我们终于在瑞典的 2004 年 ALLC/ACH 会议上开始了事情，并在关于名称（ICHIO、OHCO 等）上再三犹豫后，我们在 2005 年 4 月投票决定使用 ADHO，将“A”从“Allied”改为“Alliance”。’”³

By 2005 Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities had been published, and the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations had been established. There’s one more key event to relate, and that’s the launch in 2006 of the Digital Humanities Initiative by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), then under the chairmanship of Bruce Cole and with leadership provided by Brett Bobley, a charismatic and imaginative individual who doubles as the agency’s CIO. In an e-mail to me, Bobley describes a January 2006 lunch with another NEH staffer at which they were brainstorming ideas for what would become the Digital Humanities Initiative:
到 2005 年，Blackwell 的数字人文学科伴侣已经出版，数字人文学科组织联盟也已成立。还有一个关键事件需要提及，那就是 2006 年国家人文基金会（NEH）在布鲁斯·科尔的主席领导下，由魅力四射且富有想象力的布雷特·博布利担任首席信息官，启动了数字人文学科倡议。在给我的一封电子邮件中，博布利描述了 2006 年 1 月与另一位 NEH 工作人员共进午餐时，他们为即将成为数字人文学科倡议的想法进行头脑风暴的情景：

In 2008 the Digital Humanities Initiative became the Office of Digital Humanities, the designation of “office” assigning the program (and its budget line) a permanent place within the agency. That the major federal granting agency for scholarship in the humanities, taking its cues directly from a small but active and influential group of scholars, had devoted scarce resources to launching a number of new grant opportunities, many of them programmatically innovative in and of themselves, around an endeavor termed “digital humanities” was doubtless the tipping point for the branding of DH, at least in the United States.
2008 年，数字人文学科倡议变成了数字人文学科办公室，“办公室”的称谓为该项目（及其预算）在机构内赋予了一个永久的位置。 这个主要的联邦人文学科奖助金机构，直接从一个小而活跃且有影响力的学者群体中汲取灵感，投入稀缺资源启动了一系列新的资助机会，其中许多在程序上本身就是创新的，围绕一个被称为“数字人文学科”的努力，无疑是数字人文学科品牌化的转折点，至少在美国是如此。

These events will, I think, earn a place in histories of the profession alongside other major critical movements like the Birmingham School or Yale deconstruction. In the space of a little more than five years, digital humanities had gone from being a term of convenience used by a group of researchers who had already been working together for years to something like a movement. Individual scholars routinely now self-identify as digital humanists, or DHers. There is an unusually strong sense of community and common purpose manifested, for example, in events such as the Day of Digital Humanities, organized by a team at the University of Alberta. Its second annual iteration featured over 150 participants (up from around one hundred the first year), who blogged on a shared site about the details of their workday, posted photographs of their offices and screens, and reflected on the nature of their enterprise. Digital humanities has even been the recipient of its own Downfall remix, the Internet meme whereby the climactic scene from the HBO film depicting Hitler’s final days in the bunker is closed captioned with, in this instance, a tirade about the pernicious influence of online scholarship.
我认为这些事件将在职业历史中占有一席之地，与伯明翰学派或耶鲁解构主义等其他重大批判运动并列。在短短五年多的时间里，数字人文学科从一个方便的术语，变成了一个运动，最初是由一群已经合作多年的研究人员使用的。现在，个别学者常常自我认同为数字人文学者或 DH 者。比如，由阿尔伯塔大学的一个团队组织的数字人文学日等活动，展现了异常强烈的社区感和共同目标。其第二届年会吸引了超过 150 名参与者（比第一年大约一百人有所增加），他们在一个共享网站上博客，记录工作日的细节，发布办公室和屏幕的照片，并反思他们事业的本质。 数字人文学科甚至收到了自己版本的《堕落》混音，这是一种网络迷因，其中 HBO 电影描绘希特勒在地下室最后日子的高潮场景被加上了字幕，这次是关于在线学术研究有害影响的长篇大论。

Digital humanities was also (you may have heard) big news at the 2009 Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention in Philadelphia. On December 28, midway through the convention, William Pannapacker, one of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s officially appointed bloggers, wrote the following for the online “Brainstorm” section: “Amid all the doom and gloom of the 2009 MLA Convention, one field seems to be alive and well: the digital humanities. More than that: Among all the contending subfields, the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” (It seems fair to say that Pannapacker, who is the author of “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go” under the pseudonym Thomas Benton, is not a man easily impressed.) Jennifer Howard, meanwhile, a veteran Chronicle reporter who has covered the convention before, noted that the “vitality” of digital humanities drew “overflow crowds to too-small conference rooms.” There were several dozen panels devoted to the digital humanities at the MLA convention, and one could (and did) easily navigate the three-day convention by moving among them.
数字人文学科在 2009 年费城现代语言协会（MLA）年会上也是（你可能听说过）大新闻。12 月 28 日，在会议进行到一半时，威廉·潘纳帕克（William Pannapacker），《高等教育纪事》（Chronicle of Higher Education）官方指定的博主之一，为在线“头脑风暴”栏目写道：“在 2009 年 MLA 年会的所有悲观情绪中，有一个领域似乎生机勃勃：数字人文学科。更重要的是：在所有竞争的子领域中，数字人文学科似乎是很长一段时间以来的第一个‘下一个大事’。”（可以公平地说，潘纳帕克是以托马斯·本顿（Thomas Benton）笔名撰写《人文学科研究生院：别去》的作者，并不是一个容易被打动的人。）与此同时，詹妮弗·霍华德（Jennifer Howard），一位有经验的纪事记者，曾报道过该会议，指出数字人文学科的“活力”吸引了“溢出的观众涌入过小的会议室。”在 MLA 大会上，有几十个专门讨论数字人文学科的分会，参会者可以（并且确实可以）轻松地在这三天的大会中穿梭于这些分会之间。

Crucially, digital humanities was visible in another way at the conference: the social networking service Twitter. Twitter is the love-it-or-hate-it Web 2.0 application often maligned as the final triumph of the attention-deficit generation because it limits postings to a mere 140 characters—not 140 words, 140 characters. The reason has less to do with attention spans than Twitter’s origins in the messaging protocols of mobile devices, but the format encourages brief, conversational posts (tweets) that also tend to contain a fair measure of flair and wit. Unlike Facebook, Twitter allows for asymmetrical relationships: you can “follow” someone (or they can follow you) without the relationship being reciprocated. Tweeting has rapidly become an integral part of the conference scene, with a subset of attendees on Twitter providing real-time running commentary through a common “tag” (#mla09, for example), which allows everyone who follows it to tune in to the conversation. This phenomenon has some very specific ramifications. Amanda French ran the numbers and concluded that nearly half (48 percent) of attendees at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference were tweeting the sessions. By contrast, only 3 percent of MLA convention attendees tweeted; according to French’s data, out of about 7,800 attendees at the MLA convention only 256 tweeted. Of these, the vast majority were people already associated with digital humanities through their existing networks of followers. Jennifer Howard, again writing for the Chronicle, noted the centrality of Twitter to the DH crowd and its impact on scholarly communication, going so far as to include people’s Twitter identities in her roundup of major stories from the convention. Inside Higher Ed also devoted coverage to Twitter at the MLA convention, noting that Rosemary G. Feal was using it to connect with individual members of the organization—not surprisingly, many of them DHers. Feal, in fact, kept up a lively stream of tweets throughout the conference, gamely mixing it up with the sometimes irreverent back-channel conversation and, in a scene out of Small World had it only been written twenty years later, issued an impromptu invite for her “tweeps” to join the association’s elite for nightcaps in the penthouse of one of the convention hotels.
至关重要的是，数字人文学科在会议上以另一种方式显现：社交网络服务 Twitter。Twitter 是一个爱它或恨它的 Web 2.0 应用，常常被贬低为注意力缺陷一代的最终胜利，因为它将帖子限制在仅仅 140 个字符——不是 140 个单词，而是 140 个字符。这个原因与注意力跨度关系不大，而是与 Twitter 起源于移动设备的消息传递协议有关，但这种格式鼓励简短、对话式的帖子（推文），这些帖子往往也包含相当程度的风格和机智。与 Facebook 不同，Twitter 允许不对称的关系：你可以“关注”某人（或者他们可以关注你），而不需要互相回应。推特已迅速成为会议场景的一个重要部分，部分与会者在 Twitter 上通过一个共同的“标签”（例如#mla09）提供实时评论，这使得所有关注它的人都能参与到对话中。这一现象有一些非常具体的影响。阿曼达·法兰奇统计了数据，得出结论，近一半（48%）的数字人文学科 2009 会议的与会者在推特上发布会议内容。 相比之下，只有 3%的 MLA 大会与会者在推特上发了推文；根据 French 的数据，在大约 7800 名 MLA 大会与会者中，只有 256 人发了推文。在这些人中，绝大多数是通过他们现有的追随者网络与数字人文学科相关联的人。Jennifer Howard 再次为《纪事报》撰写，指出推特在数字人文学科人群中的中心地位及其对学术交流的影响，甚至在她对大会主要故事的总结中包括了人们的推特身份。《高等教育内部》也对 MLA 大会上的推特进行了报道，指出 Rosemary G. Feal 正在利用推特与组织的个别成员联系——毫不奇怪，他们中的许多人都是数字人文学科的从业者。 事实上，Feal 在整个会议期间保持着活跃的推文流，勇敢地与有时不拘一格的后台对话混合在一起，仿佛在 小世界 中，如果它是在二十年后写的，临时邀请她的“推友”们在其中一家会议酒店的顶层与协会的精英们共饮夜 cap。

While it’s not hard to see why the academic press devoured the story, there’s more going on than mere shenanigans. Twitter, along with blogs and other online outlets, has inscribed the digital humanities as a network topology, that is to say lines drawn by aggregates of affinities, formally and functionally manifest in who follows whom, who friends whom, who tweets whom, and who links to what. Digital humanities has also, I would propose, lately been galvanized by a group of younger (or not so young) graduate students, faculty members (both tenure line and contingent), and other academic professionals who now wield the label “digital humanities” instrumentally amid an increasingly monstrous institutional terrain defined by declining public support for higher education, rising tuitions, shrinking endowments, the proliferation of distance education and the for-profit university, and underlying it all the conversion of full-time, tenure-track academic labor to a part-time adjunct workforce. One example is the remarkable tale of Brian Croxall, the recent Emory PhD who went viral online for a period of several weeks during and after the MLA convention. Croxall had his paper “The Absent Presence: Today’s Faculty” read at the convention in absentia while he simultaneously published it on his blog after finding himself unable to afford to travel to Philadelphia because he hadn’t landed any convention interviews. As numerous observers pointed out, Croxall’s paper, which was heavily blogged and tweeted and received coverage in both the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed, was undoubtedly and by many orders of magnitude the most widely seen and read paper from the 2009 MLA convention. These events were subsequently discussed in a series of cross-postings and conversations that spilled across Twitter and the blogosphere for several weeks after the convention ended. Many seemed to feel that the connection to wider academic issues was not incidental or accidental and that digital humanities, with a culture that values collaboration, openness, nonhierarchical relations, and agility, might be an instrument for real resistance or reform.
虽然不难理解为什么学术界对这个故事如此热衷，但其中的情况远不止于简单的恶作剧。推特以及博客和其他在线媒体，将数字人文学科刻画为一种网络拓扑，也就是说，通过亲和力的聚合所划定的线条，正式和功能上体现在谁关注谁、谁与谁成为朋友、谁对谁发推、以及谁链接到什么。数字人文学科也，我认为，最近受到了一群年轻（或不那么年轻）的研究生、教职员工（包括终身教职和临时教职）以及其他学术专业人士的推动，他们在一个日益庞大的制度环境中，利用“数字人文学科”这一标签，背景是对高等教育的公共支持下降、学费上涨、捐赠减少、远程教育和营利性大学的激增，以及所有这一切背后，全职、终身教职的学术劳动转变为兼职的临时工。一个例子是布莱恩·克罗克斯尔的非凡故事，这位最近获得埃默里大学博士学位的人在现代语言协会会议期间及其后在网上迅速走红。 克罗克索尔在会议上以缺席的方式宣读了他的论文《缺席的存在：今天的教职员工》，同时在他的博客上发布了这篇论文，因为他发现自己无法负担前往费城的旅行费用，因为他没有获得任何会议的面试。正如许多观察者指出的，克罗克索尔的论文在博客和推特上被广泛讨论，并在《纪事报和高等教育内部》上得到了报道，毫无疑问，这是 2009 年现代语言协会会议上被看到和阅读的论文，数量上远远超过其他论文。这些事件随后在会议结束后的几周内，通过一系列跨帖和对话在推特和博客圈中进行了讨论。许多人似乎认为，与更广泛的学术问题的联系并非偶然，数字人文学科以重视合作、开放、非等级关系和灵活性的文化，可能是实现真正抵抗或改革的工具。

So what is digital humanities, and what is it doing in English departments? The answer to the latter portion of the question is easier. I can think of some half a dozen reasons why English departments have historically been hospitable settings for this kind of work. First, after numeric input, text has been by far the most tractable data type for computers to manipulate. Unlike images, audio, video, and so on, there is a long tradition of text-based data processing that was within the capabilities of even some of the earliest computer systems and that has for decades fed research in fields like stylistics, linguistics, and author attribution studies, all heavily associated with English departments. Second, of course, there is the long association between computers and composition, almost as long and just as rich in its lineage. Third is the pitch-perfect convergence between the intense conversations around editorial theory and method in the 1980s and the widespread means to implement electronic archives and editions very soon after; Jerome McGann is a key figure here, with his work on the Rossetti Archive, which he has repeatedly described as a vehicle for applied theory, standing as paradigmatic. Fourth, and at roughly the same time, is a modest but much-promoted belle-lettristic project around hypertext and other forms of electronic literature that continues to this day and is increasingly vibrant and diverse. Fifth is the openness of English departments to cultural studies, where computers and other objects of digital material culture become the centerpiece of analysis. I’m thinking here, for example, of the reader Stuart Hall and others put together around the Sony Walkman, that hipster iPod of old. Finally, today, we see the simultaneous explosion of interest in e-reading and e-book devices like the Kindle, iPad, and Nook and the advent of large-scale text digitization projects, the most significant of course being Google Books, with scholars like Franco Moretti taking up data mining and visualization to perform “distance readings” of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of books at a time.
那么，数字人文学科是什么，它在英语系中做什么？问题的后半部分更容易回答。我可以想到大约六个原因，为什么英语系历史上一直是这种工作的友好环境。首先，在数字输入之后，文本无疑是计算机操作的最易处理的数据类型。与图像、音频、视频等不同，文本数据处理有着悠久的传统，甚至一些最早的计算机系统也具备这种能力，并且几十年来为风格学、语言学和作者归属研究等领域的研究提供了支持，这些领域与英语系密切相关。其次，当然，计算机与写作之间的长期关联几乎同样悠久，且其渊源同样丰富。 第三是 1980 年代围绕编辑理论和方法的激烈讨论与不久后实施电子档案和版本的广泛手段之间的完美契合；杰罗姆·麦甘在这里是一个关键人物，他在罗塞蒂档案上的工作被他多次描述为应用理论的载体，成为典范。第四，大约在同一时间，有一个谦逊但备受推崇的关于超文本和其他形式电子文学的美文项目，至今仍在继续，并且日益生机勃勃和多样化。第五是英语系对文化研究的开放，计算机和其他数字物质文化的对象成为分析的中心。我在这里想到的是，斯图尔特·霍尔和其他人围绕索尼随身听（Sony Walkman）所构建的读者，那是旧时的时尚 iPod。 最后，今天，我们看到对电子阅读和电子书设备（如 Kindle、iPad 和 Nook）兴趣的同时爆炸，以及大规模文本数字化项目的出现，其中最重要的当然是 Google Books，像 Franco Moretti 这样的学者开始进行数据挖掘和可视化，以对成百上千甚至数百万本书进行“远程阅读”。

Digital humanities, which began as a term of consensus among a relatively small group of researchers, is now backed on a growing number of campuses by a level of funding, infrastructure, and administrative commitments that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Even more recently, I would argue, the network effects of blogs and Twitter at a moment when the academy itself is facing massive and often wrenching changes linked to both new technologies and the changing political and economic landscape have led to the construction of “digital humanities” as a free-floating signifier, one that increasingly serves to focus the anxiety and even outrage of individual scholars over their own lack of agency amid the turmoil in their institutions and profession. This is manifested in the intensity of debates around open-access publishing, where faculty members increasingly demand the right to retain ownership of their own scholarship—meaning their own labor—and disseminate it freely to an audience apart from or parallel with more traditional structures of academic publishing, which in turn are perceived as outgrowths of dysfunctional and outmoded practices surrounding peer review, tenure, and promotion.
数字人文学科最初是一个相对小的研究者群体之间的共识术语，现在在越来越多的校园中得到了资金、基础设施和行政承诺的支持，这在十年前是不可想象的。更近期，我认为，博客和推特的网络效应在学术界面临与新技术以及不断变化的政治和经济格局相关的大规模且常常令人痛苦的变化时，导致了“数字人文学科”作为一个自由漂浮的符号的构建，这个符号越来越多地集中体现了个别学者在其机构和职业动荡中对自身缺乏主动权的焦虑甚至愤怒。 这体现在关于开放获取出版的辩论强度上，教职员工越来越要求保留自己学术成果的所有权——意味着他们自己的劳动——并将其自由传播给一个与传统学术出版结构平行或不同的受众，而传统学术出版结构又被视为围绕同行评审、终身教职和晋升的功能失调和过时实践的衍生物。

Whatever else it might be, then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active, 24-7 life online. Isn’t that something you want in your English department?
无论它可能是什么，今天的数字人文学科是关于一种在我们通常不习惯的方式中公开可见的学术（和教学），一种与基础设施深度和明确地结合在一起的学术和教学，一种协作的学术和教学，依赖于人际网络，并在网上过着活跃的、24 小时不间断的生活。这难道不是你希望在你的英语系中看到的东西吗？