What Instagram and Community Colleges Tell Us about the Future of Digital Humanities

Abstract Two recent volumes illustrate the resilience of established critical approaches in literary studies, the potential use value of quantitative and computational methods in the humanities, and the relative lack of direct disciplinary impact that the latter have had to date. Although it once seemed clear that the future of many humanistic disciplines was at least partially quantitative, it now appears increasingly likely that quantitative research on cultural and historical questions will be conducted primarily in fields (from computer and information science to sociology to economics) where quantitative methods are already well established.“The steady state of DH, which I once believed was to be fully subsumed within the humanities, now looks much more likely to involve the diffusion of humanistic knowledge into disciplines that understand themselves to be constitutively quantitative and computational.”