ABSTRACT
Since its emergence as a disciplinary field, Digital Humanities has transformed engagement across the arts, humanities, and social sciences by facilitating new and experimental approaches to interdisciplinarity that combine digital tools, data collection, and novel methodologies across different scholarly contexts. One of the unintended consequences of this transformation, however, has been the reinforcing of old silos that place “traditional” qualitative Humanities thinking and “technical” proficiency on separate sides of the same coin. Such approaches are often a consequence of the increasing pressure to complete digital projects in short time frames and with fewer resources, usually in a way that relegates engagement to a secondary priority or afterthought. At the same time, the institutional requirements around engagement as a scholarly outcome have continued to increase, even if the parameters of that engagement have become fuzzier. This chapter draws on the long history of engagement in the Humanities as well as policy processes in higher education and national and international research infrastructure and funding mechanisms to consider the new pressures around engagement in the Digital Humanities and its allied fields. With this context in view, we examine some of the problems with using metrics-based approaches to Digital Humanities engagement in the academy and provide some alternative ways of thinking about what “engagement” means in higher education and beyond.
