Not on the sidelines

Day one of the DH2016 Institute offered a jarring wake up call to those, like me, who may have imagined digital humanities as more about consuming – gaining tools that would help to shape, deepen, and even rejuvenate my research and teaching – than creating. In reality, these activities blur: but it is clear that I am not going to be given a shiny set of tools that will magically solve my research and teaching challenges! Indeed, if the readings are to be trusted, while digital humanities approaches have much to offer the intrepid historian, they introduce a host of new questions and challenges that may, ultimately, improve the doing of history but that, in the meantime, demand serious rethinking of my assumptions, ways of working, and even aims.