I'm a little late in responding here, but I think this is an interesting question. Our recent discussions in class have had a lot to do with, not only open access and collaboration, but also how the digital humanities might make our work more interesting to those outside our discipline. I certainly agree that DH is pulling a lot of scholarly work out of the private, exclusive academic sphere into a more public sphere, and so I think that tacking "public" onto the "digital humanities" would be appropriate in a lot of ways.
However, if there is a "public digital humanities," then doesn't there have to be a "private digital humanities" as well? What would that consist of? Would "private digital humanities" default to the traditional humanities? And if so, does this reduce DH to a methodology (simply a more public way of treating the humanities) rather than a discipline of its own?
Interesting comments and thought provoking questions since it seems the direction is heading towards renaming DH based on the aforementioned arguments. I would say similar to the emergence of new media like facebook, Tweeter and so on labelled as social media to distinguish them from mass media in the orthodox way, by the same token we may rename DH as: social digital humanities. collaboration and crowdsourcing , to name but few, are obvious aspects of social activities regardless of their nature academic or non academic , private or public. It seems that social digital humanities may be more inclusive and an umbrella term. I still believe it is a discipline on its own, featuring distinct specificities.
However, if there is a "public digital humanities," then doesn't there have to be a "private digital humanities" as well? What would that consist of? Would "private digital humanities" default to the traditional humanities? And if so, does this reduce DH to a methodology (simply a more public way of treating the humanities) rather than a discipline of its own?