This brief article highlights a major change in the Digital Humanities that occurred in 2012, an MLA release containing standardized guidelines for evaluating work in the Digital Humanities. Those who stand the most to gain from this release are the DH professors themselves, as the guidelines lay some basic ground rules for evaluating this material for the purposes of promotion or gaining tenure. Although the guidelines are non-enforceable, being that they are from the MLA they are likely to be given some weight.

In this brief blog post, Dan Cohen highlights an interesting issue raised by Cliff Lynch at one of the 2007 CNI task force meetings. According to Cohen, Lynch raised the issue of museums holding on to controversial materials and how the digitization of those materials can allow them to be repatriated, either by undermining the arguments museums make or by addressing their concerns. By creating a digital replica, there is no longer a need to withhold artifacts from their originating cultures.

Dan Cohen's transcript of his anonymous speech at Harvard on March 1, 2011 provides insight into the demands scholars have digitization efforts and digital archives. Cohen identifies five major demands on the part of scholars: reliable metadata, the ability to experience serendipity, an interface to handle differing modes of research, a representation of the physical book, and open APIs to accommodate the demands digital libraries cannot anticipate. Dan Cohen's goal is to borrow the best aspects of a physical library - the ability to stumble upon new material readily as well as some measure of its tactile feel - with the ease of use of a well designed digital archive.

Marche's article criticizes digital humanists for a perceived failure to adequately address the human and interpretive nature of literature by treating it as data. Two core issues identified by Marche is that literature, unlike statistics, is terminally incomplete - that parts frequently are missing or shifting - and that data mining efforts fail to account for context in literature. Marche argues that current data mining efforts are flawed because "algorithms are inherently fascistic" and that "meaning is mushy." Marche does not oppose digitization efforts and in fact welcomes the translation of texts into digital formats, rather Marche argues that literary meaning cannot be as readily quantified as numbers - that "insight remains handmade."

"In Defense of Data" presents two articles, "The Digital Inhumanities?" by Scott Selisker and "Imaginary Targets" by Holger Schott Syme, in response to an article by Stephen Marche, "Literature is Not Data: Against Digital Humanities." Selisker's essay focuses primarily on dismantling the idea that digitization removes the human element from interpretation and enforces a quasi-authoritarian view of literature. Syme's essay addresses both Marche's misunderstanding of the motivations of the movement against Google Book's digitization efforts as well as Marche's inaccurate depiction of modern literary research in the wake of digital humanities.