Rethinking the Digital Humanities in the Context of Originary Technicity

Abstract

There seems to be a vague sense among digital humanities scholars that this emerging field should be concerned with, and engaged in, thinking the humanities differently. However, there is no significant agreement about what this might actually mean.1 Is the encounter between the humanities and digitality sufficient to make the humanitites ‘different’, or ‘new’? In what sense would digitality bring about something ‘new ’ in the humanities, and what implications would this have for the way in which the humanities are practiced in the academy? Alan Liu, among others, has raised questions for such a search for novelty or ‘new beginnings ’ in academic disciplines (Liu, 2008: 4). In his book of 2008 entitled Local Transcendence he understands the chase for ‘the new or innovative in business, technology, media, art fashion’, and (we may add) in academic disciplines, as a feature of the postindustrial Western sense of

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