From this start, this article doesn't seem based in the same reality I've been observing.

1) I don't see/or hear DH as a "corrective" so much as an "alternative."

2) DH seems pretty self-conscious about Silicon Valley utopianism. In fact, I'd argue that it's voices from DH that have been most savvy about deconstructing that rhetoric.

This strikes me as one of the more politically regressive parts of their argument and it is foundational. One of the key interventions of DH, broadly defined, is to turn a bright light on the conditions of academic labor and production. Anyone who has written a monograph—even an essay—knows that it was not done by individual scholarship. It is almost always the product of the labor and institutional support of a large number of people. There is a fantasy, a destructive fantasy, of the sole scholar working silently at a desk needing nothing more than a stack of books or papers and time to produce a work of scholarship. In fact, every author depends on a greater or lesser support network that includes librarians and archivists, peers and grad students, editors and (yes) tech support, to give an incomplete list (often the very most important support is given by life partners who labor to free time for the writer). The individually-credited monograph hides all of that labor or pretends that labor was merely incidental and unconnected to the intellectual work that appears in print. The "project-based learning" in DH (as described by the authors below) tend to make that labor visible and, in the best of cases, credited. This phrase encourages me to think that the authors' "progressive politics" is abstract, divorced from material conditions of production and reproduction. People without the ability to mobilize the requisite networks of support labor—parenting scholars, adjuncts, non-professionals—are demonstrably damaged by the fetish for "painstaking individual scholarship." The burden is especially borne heavily by women. It is not what I recognize as progressive, but is rather deeply conservative.

If this was in a peer-reviewed journal, the reviewers would hit this very first sentence with a demand for extensive citation. In the spirit of generosity, I assume the authors have references. But the problem with starting this piece, in this venue, this way is that now everyone who thinks of themselves as having a stake in this DH thing is invited to see themselves as this "advocate" they invoke. In the vast majority of cases, they will not recognize the second half of the sentence as something that they have ever, or would ever, advocate. This may be intended as a polemic that will spark serious conversation, but with the very first words a lot of the audience that would be interested in engaging this piece sees a straw man and a misrepresentation. With that, the essay only reaches those who are inclined to agree with it in the first place. That now makes me wonder, in a less generous spirit, is this an effort to engage in a debate, or is this clickbait?

I'm sure it feels unparalleled to the authors. But this is precisely the kind of claim that even a humanist shouldn't make without providing data. It may be true, but they aren't giving me any reason to not read the phrase in this edited form: "the unparalleled level of material support that it feels like Digital Humanities has received." Without doubt, when a student makes a statement like this in a paper written for my history classes, I lower their grade if they fail to provide evidence. Why should I make an exception for these experienced professionals?

Feels like the definition and establishment of a strawman. DH definitely is interested in developing data, tools, etc., but I'm not willing to concede without argument that practitioners want to leave interpretation to others or abandon it all together.

Why should the establishment of a new field of the Humanities imply that all other humanities fields are invalid? Why can't it just be one of many fields. Why should the existence of DH be threatening?

Isn't this self-contradictory. Technical expertise trumps all and the practitioners refuse to be critical, but all of these people we've cited have little technical expertise and have made their name by being critical.

This may be the first critique with which I unequivocally agree. If the entire article were reshaped around this point - How Supposed Techno-Meritocracy Promotes a Homogenized, Exclusive System - it would be a more useful article.

I just view the DH movement as fundamentally different:

...pushing the tech industry toward a more interpretative, suspicious, less technocratic, conservative, managerial, <del>lab-based</del> practice.

Is it?

I'd be more interested in an article that began with observing this possible lacuna in DH and explored ways that DH has or might address questions of "identity and politics."

?

Seems like a pretty big difference.

Really? There's not research to be done here? I find that hard to believe. Why not simply ask Don Waters or Brett Bobley?

Et tu?

Lots of dependence on "implications" in this argument. I've never heard a DH scholar even vaguely make a statement like this. In fact, it's converse is probably most often used to signal that such work is necessary beyond whatever project or tool is being showcased.

And why not? The authors present such a narrow and traditional notion of the humanities that work against their claim to be returning politics to literary study.

That was a lot of background/build-up on UVA literary critical history for such a vague association.

Interesting, but I'd like to see a citation here.

Also, not sure it's fair to say that the Common Core was/is favored by the Right.

Okay, maybe I'm just a neoliberal by this definition.

This framework is repeated throughout: because of the success of B, A no longer has value. I don't see how that's true in terms of the structure of English departments/university priorities or digital humanities rhetoric.

So the problem is that someone besides a traditional independent academic researchers is getting paid to do "humanities" work? Expanding the definition of scholarly labor to include such positions seems far more radical, both politically and economically, than anything outlined here.

Got a better idea?

Yeah, I didn't understand how the original LARB article somehow twisted the often open nature of DH projects into a Neoliberal consolidation of resources. The libraries and archives that are at the heart of the research university system are simply being opened to a broader audience through online distribution. This costs money, but isn't spending public money to provide goods to the people more of a socialist model than a neoliberal one?

Good list of the many fields mutually influenced by the development of DH.