Is Digital Humanities a Field? An Answer from the Point of View of Language

Abstract

This article reflects on the way apparently low-level linguistic variances in the way scholars write about the "digital humanities" point to overarching conceptual issues relating to the "DH" field.Is digital humanities a disciplinary field?Is it unified enough to be one?Should it be?These are some of the questions related to discipline formation and professionalization that digital humanists have recently asked.The unstable mix of grammatical and stylistic usages they employ to discuss their field represents their divergent answers.Currently, their linguistic usage seems to signal a trend toward a unitary sense of field.However, that sense is still being inflected by the larger conversation that the digital humanities field is having with overarching and neighboring fields of humanities scholarship with cognate linguistic usages.

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