What are the Digital Humanities?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, has written a short essay on the history of  "the Digital Humanities" in The Humanities, Done Digitally, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Digital Campus (May 8, 2011).

Some quotes:

"Just as there are scholars who write about film from perspectives that don't take into account the intellectual history of film studies, and thus are not considered part of the field, there are scholars who work with digital materials but who remain outside the traditions and assumptions of the digital humanities."

 
" The state of things in digital humanities today rests in that creative tension, between those who've been in the field for a long time and those who are coming to it today, between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, between making and interpreting, between the field's history and its future. Scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally. The particular contribution of the digital humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do, as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another."