The False Promise of Digital Humanities

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Despite academic enthusiasm for the digital humanities, the field rests on two fundamental theoretical errors. First is the idea that thinking humanistically is a matter of taking a framework of ideas and “applying” it to a text or a work of art. The second is that applying ideas in this way leads to an external self-subsistent result, be it a theory or another book. But humanistic scholarship does not proceed by means of experiments that yield results. It is creative, more akin to poetry and fiction than to chemistry or physics: it draws not just on a body of knowledge, though knowledge is indispensable, but on the scholar’s imagination and sense of reality. It makes no sense to accelerate the work of thinking by delegating it to a computer when it is precisely the experience of thought that constitutes the substance of a humanistic education.</jats:p>