"A number of years ago, I put it this way. Digital media is a kind of bet. You can bet that it won't be important and ignore it. Or you can bet that it will and start studying it, start incorporating it into your discipline. 15 years ago, when I was in grad school, I bet on the digital. But as a discipline we still bet that it won't be important (even though that is clearly idiotic). We still send out PhDs with little or no digital literacy, which in my mind is like sending out astronomers who don't know how to work a telescope: fine for a Ptolemaic solar system."

Alex Reid, "digital natives in graduate school"

"I’ve had the pleasure of talking with lots and lots of people in Digital Humanities from among a wide range of disciplines. And I’ve been having that conversation since the mid-nineties. I’ve discovered that there are lots of things that distinguish an historian from, say, a literary critic or a philosopher, and there are a lot of differences between 1995 and 2011. But to me, there’s always been a profound — and profoundly exciting and enabling — commonality to everyone who finds their way to DH. And that commonality, I think, involves moving from reading and critiquing to building and making.

"As humanists, we are inclined to read maps (to pick one example) as texts, as instruments of cultural desire, as visualizations of imperial ideology, as records of the emergence of national identity, and so forth. This is all very good. In fact, I would say it’s at the root of what it means to engage in humanistic inquiry. Almost everyone in Digital Humanities was taught to do this and loves to do this. But making a map (with a GIS system, say) is an entirely different experience. DH-ers insist — again and again — that this process of creation yields insights that are difficult to acquire otherwise. It’s the thing I’ve been hearing for as I long as I’ve been in this. People who mark up texts say it, as do those who build software, hack social networks, createvisualizations, and pursue the dozens of other forms of haptic engagement that bring DH-ers to the same table. Building is, for us, a new kind of hermeneutic — one that is quite a bit more radical than taking the traditional methods of humanistic inquiry and applying them to digital objects. Media studies, game studies, critical code studies, and various other disciplines have brought wonderful new things to the table for humanistic study, but I will say (at my peril) that none of these represent as radical a shift as the move from reading to making. [...]

"Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right."

Isaac Asimov, Foundation, 1951

"It is no small achievement of Marxian, gender, and race studies to have announced the naked chauvinisms of this imperialist cultural narrative. But having now knocked the self-satisfied smirk off of the civilizing project of literary study, there seems little justification left for English to dominate its cousins in the humanities. To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it. [...]

"To paraphrase one of the least insightful essayists of our time, the world is emphatically not flat. It is everywhere richly textured. And textured in a complex interweaving that defies the narrow confines of vernacular or hemispheric bounds. Our task as humanists of the twenty-first century is to make those long and deep traditions visible, and to do so in the teeth of those forces that would strip them away, be those forces technological, commercial, political, or intellectual."

Feisal G. Mohamed, "Are English Departments Killing the Humanities?", Dissent Magazine