Questions for DH

I’m still thinking about Roopika Risam’s DH 2025 keynote entitled “Digital Humanities for a World Unmade.” As a part of that talk, Risam references four questions that form the theoretical foundations for minimal computing, using them to think about the work the field can do in the present moment:

• What do we need?
• What do we have?
• What must we prioritize?
• What are we willing to give up?

I love this framing, in part because it reminds me so much of the perennial question “what is digital humanities?” So often I think that specific question is how we open introductory syllabi for students new to the topic, but I often find that those discussions go nowhere. It’s not a bad question necessarily, but the topic has to be approached with care to make it matter for newcomers. Risam’s questions, in contrast, are activating, urgent, and provocative. I liked them so much that I fired off a post on BlueSky about how alternative questions like these would serve as a far better foundation for an “Intro to DH” syllabus.

Lately I’ve been putting together a range of potential course descriptions and workshop series about digital humanities. It’s great fun - I always enjoy this part of teaching for how it lets you live in possibilities. I found myself returning to the questions-first model again when I was asked to sketch out a short series meant to introduce digital humanities to a broad audience.

Here’s the rough breakdown, with a few annotations about what I would do in each session. I was asked to sketch out a four-session sequence, with each meeting lasting for roughly ninety minutes.

1. What is DH?
   • Disciplinary scavenger hunt
   • With some prompting and select resources, students bring projects of interest from their own disciplines back to the group to discuss
2. How do we do DH?
   • Methods sampler
   • Lightning talks from practitioners about a variety of different methods and approaches
3. What do we need DH to be?
   • Budgeting workshop
   • Discussion of how funding enables and intersects with the infrastructure for doing DH work that matters to us
4. What is DH for me?
   • Project proposal design jam
   • Students share project proposals to discuss with the group connecting what they have learned with their own interests and offering a plan for their own future in DH

So the sessions (and questions) start big and abstract. As we move forward, the topics become more personal and dependent on the person. Even if the students end with more questions than they began, my hope is that students will at least be able to see why these questions matter. And with any luck, this kind of framing will help students to see themselves in the field and to see the field in themselves.

What is the field and why does it matter? The answers depend on you.