WHAT SIGNIFICANCE DO THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES HAVE FOR HUMANITIES?

This article argues that the digital humanities can only rise to the level of an explanation if we see that the underlying issue is the disciplinary identity not of the digital humanities but of the humanities themselves. In both their promise and their threat, the digital humanities serve as a shadow play for a future form of the humanities that wishes to include what contemporary society values about the digital without losing its soul to other domains of knowledge work that have gone digital to stake their claim to that society. It explores by means of the analysis of a real project step by step how the question of the meaning of the digital humanities registers both a specific problem in the digital humanities and the larger crisis of the meaningfulness of today's humanities.