Foreword Cathy N. Davidson

• Vii – Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field challenges the reader to not only visit the intellectual bounty across, around, and in and about digital humanities, but also helps us to explain its evolution. How did we get here? Where are we now? How far can we go? For an emerging field to become an established field, this work marks a necessary and vital contribution at the right moment.
• Viii – Klein helps those who do not understand the digital humanities to see how they, in fact, can both contribute vitally to central disciplines and also work through the assumptions at the heart of those disciplines, including methodologically. Digital humanities do so not out of naïveté but out of the interdiscipline’s own generic needs. 
  • Digital humanities as interdisciplinary
• Ix – In walking us through examples with such patience, Klein shows how interdisciplinary is this field of digital humanities in its practices, its tools, its methods, and its publications. She also shows how all of those things— practices, tools, methodology, publication—are the object of study of the digital humanities.
• X – Beyond that, Klein is suggesting, I believe, that we have entered an important moment in higher education where many of the disciplinary boundaries are not just being crossed but are being interwoven in exciting new ways. In that interweaving, digital humanities has an absolutely central place—as model, pioneer, and predecessor to many different kinds of interdisciplinary “mash-ups” yet to come.

• 6 – This book has an additional audience as well: scholars, teachers, and students of interdisciplinarity. Lessons from the literature on interdisciplinarity are often ignored in Digital Humanities, resulting in imprecise use of terminology and shallow understanding of theory and practice. At the same time, only by mapping situated practices can scholars of interdisciplinarity test their theories.
• 6-7 – In making this study of their arguments and actions, this book is itself interdisciplinary, in a triangulation of historiographical, sociological, and rhetorical methods. Historiographical analysis uncovers genealogies of origin, benchmark events, periodizations, and tensions between continuity and change. Sociological analysis examines how knowledge is codified in conditions of group membership and sanctioned practices. Rhetorical analysis dissects the claims by which people construct a field, patterns of consensus and difference, and the ways keywords and taxonomies structure hierarchies of value.
• 7 – These methods are not isolated. In the manner of Michel Foucault’s genealogical studies of knowledge, historiography considers how discursive objects, concepts, and strategies produce regularities, rules, and unities that are challenged by ruptures, refigurations, and transformations. In the manner of Pierre Bourdieu’s studies of the academic sphere, questions about power, conflict, and change arise in tracking the production, circulation, and institutionalization of knowledge. And, in the manner of Tony Becher’s studies of disciplinarity, tracing historical and rhetorical patterns also entails an anthropological interest in how influential figures, artifacts, and literature establish cognitive authority, reputational systems, cultural identity, and symbolism.
• 8 – Some will wonder why another book is needed. Matthew Gold’s anthology Debates in Digital Humanities and David Berry’s Understanding Digital Humanities provide textbooks, along with the predecessor Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities. Two more recent textbooks also present an overview. Terras, Nyhan, and Vanhoutte’s 2013 Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader compiles core readings on the meaning, scope, and implementation of this field, with commentaries by the editors and authors, an annotated bibliography, and sample postings and analysis of the definitional exercise “Day of Digital Humanities.” Aimed at non-specialists, Gold’s forthcoming DH: A Short Introduction to the Digital Humanities will present a broad historical picture from antecedents to recent expansion and future directions. Warwick, Terras, and Nyhan’s Digital Humanities in Practice is a practical guide to key topics for academic and cultural heritage audiences, with bibliographies. And, Burdick and colleagues’ Digital_Humanities includes synthetic mappings, emerging methods and genres, case studies, along with a short guide. However, none of these and other publications interrogates the claim of being “interdisciplinary.”
• 17 – In introducing an issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities on topic modeling, the Digital Humanities Specialist blogger at the Stanford University Libraries also calls DH “a Movement Expressed in a Method Enshrined in a Tool.” Widespread focus on tools and methods has fostered the notion that DH is a handmaiden to humanities. Authors of the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 cite common dismissals: “it’s just a tool; it’s just a repository; it’s just pedagogy.” These judgments perpetuate a hierarchy of value that regards resource production as less worthy than interpretation, archival and library work as secondary to scholarship, and teaching of lesser value than research.
• 26 – Tackling the question of what constitutes Digital Humanities from the perspective of language, Alan Liu asked whether DH is singular or plural, a “field” or “fields,” or as the Wikipedia entry suggests, an “area.” Liu drew parallels to the high-level generality of “media” for varied mediums, “data” for “datum,” and singular verb “is” for the plurality of American studies. As he also suggested in the second epigraph to this chapter, the answer to the question of identity will depend on conversations not only with disciplines but also with “cousin” fields and the wider public. Exploring their fit within a shared agenda will not result in a false harmony. It will illuminate their “conjunction and collision.” The final preliminary step for understanding interdisciplinarity in Digital Humanities lies in comparative lessons from “cousin” fields and their transversal operations.
• 30 – Multiple interdisciplinarities are also “in the mix” of Digital Humanities. The field has “congealed” to the point it has a recognized canon, journals, organizations, and centers. An “integrative” tendency is evident in the formation of an identifiable field, though a “disintegrating tendency” is also evident in critical and oppositional stances that heighten debate on whether the purpose of DH is to serve traditional humanities or to transform them.
• 45-46 – By privileging principles of objectivity, formal logic, and instrumental applications in Mathesis, Drucker’s formulation of “digital humanities” prioritizes the cultural authority of technical rationality manifested in quantitative method, automated processing, classification, a mechanistic view of analysis, and a dichotomy of subject and object. By privileging subjectivity, aesthetics, interpretation, and emergent phenomena, “speculative computing” prioritizes questions of textuality, rhetorical properties of graphicality in design, visual modes of knowing, and epistemological and ideological critique of how we represent knowledge. Mechanistic claims of truth, purity, and validity are further challenged by a probablitistic view of knowledge and heteroglossic processes, informed by theories of constructivism and post-structuralism, cognitive science, and the fields of culture/media/and visual studies.
• 47 – In contrast, the second wave has been qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, and generative in nature. It moved beyond the primacy of text to practices and qualities that can inhere in any medium, including timebased art forms such as film, music, and animation; visual traditions such as graphics and design; spatial practices such as architecture and geography; and curatorial practices associated with museums and galleries. The agenda of the field also expanded to include the cultural and social impact of new technologies and born-digital materials such as electronic literature and web-based artifacts. DH became an umbrella term for a multidisciplinary array of practices that extend beyond traditional humanities departments to include architecture, geography, information studies, film and media studies, anthropology, and other social sciences. Interdisciplinary is a keyword in the second wave, along with collaborative, socially engaged, global, and open access.