open up the conversation to the public whose support the traditional humanities has lost. If anyone and everyone can join in, if the invitation of open access is widely accepted, appreciation of what humanists do will grow beyond the confines of the university

this simple, but amazing fact: almost none of this--Twitter, blogs, PDFs, eBooks, Google, Findings--would have been intelligible to a writer fifteen years ago

This is a bittersweet pill. On the one hand, it's encouraging that the digital humanities look to the outside for inspiration and influence—it's one example of a re-orientation of humanistic practice toward the world and its interests. But on the other hand, the rationale for that orientation is somewhat perverted; it is motivated primarily by an inward-looking reformational interest. This is why so much of the talk in digital humanities is about digital humanities. This is institution-building, not world-building.

worst case

techno-liberalism

the digital humanities becomes an organizational-political lever to advance arguments for the reformation of the humanities, but whose means of reformation is primarily self-reflexive, and whose manner of executing on that self-reflexive reformation relies largely on imported materials and methods to bulk up the ramparts that would protect humanism from the world it might otherwise enter

But the lower faculties must resist the temptation to partake of daily life only just enough to mine convenient resources into makeshift parapets