How much Humanities does Digital Humanities need?

In the framework of the Summer University a public panel discussion will take place in the lecture hall of the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften. It is scheduled for Thursday 26th of July 2018 from 16:15 to 17:45. This year the panel discussion is devoted to the question "How much Humanities does Digital Humanities need?"

The question seems very important to me, because of at least the following reasons:

The development of the Digital Humanities itself is very much project-driven. These projects, many times, are more highly valued because of the advanced technology which they develop or the fancy tools which they employ, than for their Humanities contents. Do we really want to discard all the profound knowledge which has been created by the Humanities in a broad sense over the centuries and just concentrate on what the new technologies allow us to do? Do we not want to make the knowledge which has been created, abandoned, recreated over time by different communities, in different countries, under the most varied conditions, more openly available, show its wealth, its limitations, its ideologies and conceptualisations of the world and the beings who inhabit it, and just look at the output of digitalisation and computer technologies?
The more people take up Digital Humanities, the more there seems to be a tendency to mistake Digital Humanities as equivalent to using and applying computer tools and computational methods to cultural artefacts and analysing them as such, than to observing critically the consequences and implications of the application of computational methods and tools to cultural artefacts of all kinds by asking questions like what happens at the intersection of computing tools with cultural artefacts of all kinds? How do questions have to be formulated if they are to be analysed by applying computational methods? How are computational methods and tools used to create new knowledge? In which way do the objects of study challenge such methods and tools? How do the objects of study change when computational methods and tools are applied to them?
The more digital humanities takes firm root in curricula and the more resources are committed by institutions towards developing DH and integrating it in standalone courses, graduate degrees and undergraduate majors and minors, the more the question arises, where are the curricula based and what view of digital humanities do they transport and foster. Is the focus more on the technical and informational side of Digital Humanities or is the focus on the new epistemology "Digital Humanities", which has its firm roots in the knowledge created by the humanities in the past and present and aims, by integrating and exploiting computational approaches, methods and tools, not only at bringing the knowledege created in the different disciplines together, but also to question it, extend it, contextualise it, integrate it with new questions and perspectives in order to arrive at a more inclusive, sensitive, in the end more human, conceptualisation of the world, than has been the case or possible in the past?

Members of the panel