The Brave Side of Digital Humanities

Abstract

The question of “what counts?” in a field is an important component of community formation and is critical for eking out resources in the academic ecosystem. But what is the effect when the conversation is not about recognizing similarity across differences or disparity in order to build a common ground, but rather, about declaring something to be unrecognizable within the confines of a field? The limits of recognition and misrecognition have been the site of some of the thorny debates over what constitutes the field of digital humanities, who can best relay its genealogy, and perhaps most critically, how the field will be shaped in the years to come. This article engages with two current conversations and considers the politics and possibilities of a DH project that builds a sustainable practice of a self in academia and a lifeline to others as a way of imagining a collective and radical community of scholarship. By focusing on the #AntiJemimas collection of blogs, this inquiry traces a particular mode of critical digital inquiry that is at once political, personal, and performative and challenges the question of “what counts?” in the field formation of the digital humanities.