You might also want to read Patrik Svensson’s “Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities” in Digital Humanities Quarterly. See: http://is.gd/6afB0

I did find your questions “mildly ridiculous,” Rana, but I certainly understand why you’re insulted by Steve’s response. Using Blackboard definitely doesn’t make someone a digital humanist, but subjecting Blackboard to rigorous critical study does. Similarly, listening to Madonna doesn’t make someone a cultural critic (it would be mildly ridiculous to ask whether it does), but subjecting Madonna to rigorous critical study does.
Here are a couple of Digital Humanities 101 resources: first, the definitions from the “Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities” project undertaken by TAPOR: http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/How_do_you_define_Humanities_Computing_/_Digital_Humanities%3F — the participants’ descriptions of their days is also immensely useful, though more time-consuming: http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/List_of_Day_of_DH_Participants (I remember I spent that whole day writing a syllabus for a course called “Creating Digital History,” for instance.)

Second (or third, or 2B, or whatever), here are the abstracts from the Digital Humanities 2009 conference: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/index.html%3Fpage_id=99.html Browsing through that would be a good way to get a sense of what activities are considered scholarship in the Digital Humanities. See also various resources at http://digitalhumanities.org/.

The Blackwell Companions are almost always good intros to a topic. The one for DH published several years ago is, appropriately enough, available in its entirety online for free:

http://digitalhumanities.org/companion/

See also the related volume on Digital Literary Studies:

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Digital_humanities

You – and others like you – spend a lot of time talking about how digital humanities is a game-changer, the wave of the future, the way that scholars will communicate with the general public about what they do… and yet you don’t really explain HOW.

If you’re going to have conversations in public, then you need to expect to field questions from the interested but inexperienced. I’m not a complete newbie, after all – I’ve been blogging since 2003, have multiple web profiles on a number of sites, am actively present on Twitter, use computers in my research and pedagogy, am an early adopter of Googlewave, maintain a flickr account and an online gallery, and so on. And yet your reaction to my quite reasonable question – what exactly is the nature of your project, and how is it to be explained to those not already in the know – is to treat me with disdain and irritation.

Hell, even a link to “Here let me google this for you” that pointed in the right direction to a few useful “digital humanities 101″ posts would have been better than this response. If digital humanities is about educating the public about the nature of your scholarship, your response is a piss-poor effort, giving the impression that this, like the rest of academia, is a land where outsiders are not welcome, and only those who have jumped through the hoops and been properly indoctrinated are allowed to participate. Seems an awful lot like the sort of culture that digital humanities advocates claim to be against, no?

No wonder digital humanities is having trouble getting traction among the establishment, if this is how you treat the interested but sceptical. Nice job, dude.

Put another way – can I, as a historian of a time period before computers, be a said to be a “digital scholar”? I use computers in my work… does that count? Do I have to blog about it? Do I have to use twitter in my teaching? Is Blackboard enough, or not?

Right now I’m seeing a lot of talk about potential, but not much specificity.

That’s because this whole thing is new to you, but it is not new to hundreds of others who move in a concrete set of communities that has existed for decades. For these people, your questions sound mildly ridiculous. It’s as if, having never heard of a field called “physics,” you walked in a room full of physicists and started saying, “So what’s this? Something about “forces?” I don’t know . . . maybe there’s some potential here, but it all sounds kind of vague.”

I hope you’ll excuse us if we don’t drop everything to explain ourselves to someone who, having made almost no effort to find out what it’s all about, proceeds to tell that we’re not ready prime time.

Whether the digitization originated within academia (TEAMS, Perseus), industry (Google Books, Ancestry.com), or religion (CCEL, NewAdvent), it has made questions answerable in a way they never were in previous years. I am now able to compare translations of Herodotus in a blog post or cite the Apostolic Fathers in an e-mail argument, neither of which would have happened before. Admittedly, such things would have been accessible twenty years ago — provided I were willing to take time off work or arrange childcare, drive to the closest research library which would deign to let me in, and spend several hours sorting through finding aids and manually transcribing from print. You’re certainly aware of the costs of research pre-digitization (though perhaps some of your readers are not aware of the costs to those neither affiliated with a university nor able to conduct their research within standard working hours), and likely question the value of making some random blog post more informed. But without the easy access that comes with mass digitization, such informal conversations would never deserve the effort required to research something so trivial. For an ever-increasing proportion of the public, facts are knowable in ways they have never been before. This may not transform anything at all within academia, but it is utterly transformative to the non-academic public, and I believe that it holds potential to incrementally transform the relationship between that public and the academic humanities.