In completing my final project for my digital praxis class I finally came up with my personal definition of digital humanities.
I included it in the 32-page paper as this "reflective sidebar."
In the spirit of zine makers being people I know well, I would like to take a second to consider feelings. I wrote in my notes:
I'm having feelings about stripping out the author/title information before I group by date. I mean, not that I want the visualizations attached to names, just that they're an important data point for me, more on a kinship level, if that makes sense. It's like zines are my charges or my friends. And that's not untrue. The zines are in my charge, and hundreds of their authors are my friends. … But seriously I have feelings about thinking of my individual snowflakes in aggregate. Is it okay to have feelings in DH? I'd like that answer to be yes.
Over the course of the semester, contemplating what "digital humanities" means, one of the most satisfying answers I have come up with is that DH is an ethos as much/more than it is a practice, at least for now. As technology evolves something we consider digital now might not be in the future, just as typing a paper on a computer might have once been viewed as a digital project. DH seems to me, to be about community, and a commitment to doing work in in a critical, multidisciplinary, and collaborative way. To me, part of "critical" must contain emotional. I am taken by the notion of hospitality as a value in unconference codes of conduct. So, while my moment of discontent about by necessity severing the zine makers from the descriptions of their zines, ultimately did not change my course, I like to think that people working in this field do extend their collaboration to the human subjects of their work.