Helpful, Harmless or Heretical?

In The Netherlands, the discipline of Digital Humanities is currently being presented as “the next big thing”. Institutions such as the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the University of Amsterdam have made Digital Humanities (or eHumanities) a “spear point”  and create positions especially for digital humanists  or for those who are expected to become one. That does not mean, however, that the academic community as a whole is ready for DH and is embracing all digital things new. Still only a relatively small group of researchers is actually “doing” it. Acquiring funding for a DH project from the national funding agency NWO is still extremely difficult, because review panels do not have enough DH expertise to evaluate submissions. So what’s it like, to be a digital humanist in The Netherlands? If one thing, it is a balancing act. The general public is usually very interested in our projects. Our academic peers, however, tend to be cautious. Some are enthousiastic, others make an aggressive stand against anything having to do with computers and computational methods. The same goes for students. Each of these groups need a different approach when we want to inform them about the new possibilities in DH. In my lecture, I will give some examples of these approaches from my own life as a scholar in what I call Computational Literary Studies.