In “How to Not Teach Digital Humanities,” Ryan Cordell makes DH take a hard look in the mirror. Or rather, he accuses DH of too much self-contemplation, of asking one too many times “What is DH?” Cordell ventures that students aren’t really interested in these “meta-academic” questions, and that professors would do better to stick to more direct theory and practice. I agree—as an emerging field, I think DH defines itself better through practice than self-questioning.

Cordell honestly reflects on mistakes he made in designing his own DH curriculum, and shows sympathy to critics of the field. On digitality, he remarks that many students suffer from digital exhaustion, and gravitate to the humanities to read and think deeply away from more “practical” and “technical” fields. Rather than a way to appeal to attention-deficit, internet-addicted teens, from this perspective DH will only repulse them.

I agreed with Cordell that DH should try to temper its perhaps unseemly digitality by placing itself on a long timeline of evolving media (integration), and that DH would do well to introduce itself in small doses into humanities courses.

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