Despite all this enthusiasm, the question of what the digital humanities is has yet to be given a satisfactory answer. Indeed, no one asks it more often than the digital humanists themselves. The recent proliferation of books on the subject—from sourcebooks and anthologies to critical manifestos—is a sign of a field suffering an identity crisis, trying to determine what, if anything, unites the disparate activities carried on under its banner.

The New Critics gave us close reading, the engagement with the minute verbal nuances of a text, and the mode still thrives—Helen Vendler’s studies of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Dickinson’s poems are classic contemporary examples. But as Moretti argues in “Conjectures on World Literature,” one of the essays in his new collection, Distant Reading, close reading implies that certain texts are especially worthy of this kind of scrutiny—that is, it implies a canon. “If you want to look beyond the canon ... close reading will not do it,” he observes; you can closely read two hundred poems, but not twenty thousand poems. To analyze such a large quantity of texts, you need to “focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems.” And this is the kind of concrete pattern-finding that computers specialize in. Distant reading is reading like a computer, not like a human being: as Moretti forthrightly says, “We know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.”

Moretti gives an example of this kind of not-reading in an essay revealingly titled “Style, Inc.: Reflections on 7,000 Titles.” Rather than read every novel published in Britain between 1740 and 1850, a task that would fill a lifetime, he takes only the titles of all those novels, and uses a computer program to find patterns in the data. One such pattern emerges right away: over the period in question, the average length of a title decreases dramatically, from fifteen to twenty words at the beginning to six words at the end. This is owed especially to the disappearance of very long titles, which were conventional in early novels but became unfashionable.

Underlying these administrative problems is a more basic question about the nature of humanistic work. A humanities culture that prizes thinking and writing will tend to look down on making and building as banausic—the kind of labor that can be outsourced to non-specialists. Digital humanities gains some of its self-confidence from the democratic challenge that it mounts to that old distinction. “Personally, I think Digital Humanities is about building things,” said Ramsay in a polarizing talk at the MLA convention in 2011, printed in Defining Digital Humanities. Unlike many theorists, however, he was willing to make this demand concrete: “Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of digital humanities and I say ‘yes.’ ”[...] if digital humanities is to be a distinctive discipline, it should require distinctive skills.

But are they humanistic skills? Was it necessary for a humanist in the past five hundred years to know how to set type and publish a book? Moreover, is it practical for a humanities curriculum that can already stretch for ten years or more, from freshman year to Ph.D., to be expanded to include programming skills?

T.S. Eliot said it best, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"and I would add, Where is the information we have lost in data?

If computers cannot think better than human beings, digital humanists are left with the argument that at least they can think faster—the John Henry argument. In the essay “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Humanities,” Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell observe, “Reading Foucault and applying his theoretical framework can takes months or years of application. A web-based text analysis tool could apply its theoretical position in seconds.” Never mind that understanding that theoretical position will take more than seconds. Here are nicely encapsulated the two fundamental errors that theorizing about the revolutionary nature of digital humanities often commits. First, there 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 the idea that applying ideas in this way leads to an external self-subsistent result, be it a theory or another book or a piece of driftwood with pictures on it.

Both of these errors derive from a false analogy between the humanities and the sciences. Humanistic thinking does not proceed by experiments that yield results; it is a matter of mental experiences, provoked by works of art and history, that expand the range of one’s understanding and sympathy. 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. The humanities cannot take place in seconds. This is why the best humanistic scholarship 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 a scholar’s imagination and sense of reality. Of course this work cannot be done in isolation, any more than a poem can be written in a private language. But just as writing a poem with a computer is no easier than writing one with a pen, so no computer can take on the human part of humanistic work, which is to feel and to think one’s way into different times, places, and minds.

But it would be unfair to generalize from the obviously anti-humanistic manifestations of digital humanities to the entirety of the field itself, for the simple reason that the field has no common essence: it is not a species but at best a genus, comprising a wide range of activities that have little relationship with one another. At its most pragmatic, digital humanities has less to do with ways of thinking than with problems of university administration. The advent of the Internet has posed challenges to the institutions of academia just as it has to the music business, and one function of digital humanities is to address these issues.

Within this range of approaches, we can distinguish a minimalist and a maximalist understanding of digital humanities. On the one hand, it can be simply the application of computer technology to traditional scholarly functions, such as the editing of texts. An exemplary project of this kind is the Rossetti Archive created by Jerome McGann, an online repository of texts and images related to the career of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: this is essentially an open-ended, universally accessible scholarly edition. To others, however, digital humanities represents a paradigm shift in the way we think about culture itself, spurring a change not just in the medium of humanistic work but also in its very substance. At their most starry-eyed, some digital humanists—such as the authors of the jargon-laden manifesto and handbook Digital_Humanities—want to suggest that the addition of the high-powered adjective to the long-suffering noun signals nothing less than an epoch in human history: “We live in one of those rare moments of opportunity for the humanities, not unlike other great eras of cultural-historical transformation such as the shift from the scroll to the codex, the invention of movable type, the encounter with the New World, and the Industrial Revolution.”

The best thing that the humanities could do at this moment, then, is not to embrace the momentum of the digital, the tech tsunami, but to resist it and to critique it. This is not Luddism