this turn is occurring, for the most part, as if plenty of fields, and professors, and artists, and students, and humanists hadn't been already been doing this for years
This is an interesting perspective of the digital humanities field. Is this not true with all field though? Before biology was a field, people still investigated evolution, and biological concepts. I would argue that just because there is a name for a field of study, it does not devalue the work of people who were already doing it or do not classify as being in that field.