Daejeon, July 27–31
Reflections on the digital humanities (DH) as a discipline often revolve around a ‘tension at the heart’ of DH (Warwick 2016). The exact nature of this tension is in dispute. To name some discourses: (i) dark sides of DH as a symptom of neoliberalism (Chun et al. 2016; Smithies 2022); (ii) the hack vs. yack debate about the identity of DH practitioners (Ramsay 2013; Nowviskie 2014; Dombrowski 2022); (iii) structural issues such as data gaps, monolingualism, and environmental sustainability (Arnold et al. 2026), particularly in the context of growing adoption rates of generative AI / LLM tools, both within society at large and DH as a field of implementation. These developments have exacerbated many of the existing debates surrounding labour displacement (Smithies 2017), corporate capture (Klein / D’Ignazio 2024), accelerationism (Caruso / Spadaro 2024), and the diversity of global issues in DH (Fiormonte / Chaudhari / Ricaurte 2022).
There is a common denominator to those wide-ranging concerns: They carry political and socio-economic overtones. Such overtones are rooted in belief systems. Belief systems are inherently ideological but rarely made explicit in their entirety. In our contribution, we expand on the current state of discussion by (a) shining a light on the question of underlying ‘ideology’ in DH, and (b) connecting this question to the nature of ‘knowledge’ produced in the discipline. To that end, we foreground two micro-studies, bridging snapshots from the time of the early post-war emergence of DH (1960s) to its latest significant rift (2020s); thereby highlighting processes of disciplinary formation and (partial) dissolution. These observations are based in a German perspective which, while part of the dominant Global North narrative, has not yet found extended discussion in DH historiography (e.g. Hockey 2004, Vanhoutte 2013, Kim / Koh 2021). Rather than extrapolating a global significance from our findings, we argue the opposite: that the spatiotemporal, societal situatedness of ‘knowledge work’ must be taken into account in meta-reflections of DH. This is borne out by discussing the micro-studies, originally conducted independently from each other, in a shared framework:
By joining these individual strands of research in a dialogue, we look beyond single dimensions to sharpen our understanding of the complexity of underlying assumptions that may drive the discipline towards division. While our introspection is grounded in theory, it aims to focus attention on material (working) conditions in DH that actively shape knowledge production. This translates into the explicit politicisation of narratives within and about DH; narratives that invite questions about the implicit constitution of ‘DH’ and its genealogies. This is relevant for imagining futures for the field. The assumption underlying our own paper is one where DH is seen as an academic activity. This is not a fixed condition, but it determines our interest in knowledge work as the common factor of investigation: its organization, ascribed value, and role in knowledge production. While ‘knowledge work’ has been mentioned before in DH-adjacent discussions (e.g. Liu 2004), its evolving nature, and the evolving nature of DH itself, require us to analyze it as a specific interplay between, in this case, academics and their environment of operation. In the following, we briefly sketch some of our arguments to that effect.
While there is a recognition of ideological aspects when debating the current state of DH (e.g. Matthew Hannah articulating a “need for [...] Marxist DH”, Hannah 2023), its absence from DH historiography gives pause. This is obvious when it comes to Germany, considering its divided nature throughout the second half of the 20th century. There are fragmented historiographies of DH in West Germany (Thaller 1990; Haber 2011: 11–23; Neubert 2026: 114–117). The history of DH in East Germany, however, remains entirely unexplored. For the sub-field of digital history, historiographies centered on the Global East were the subject of discussion at a workshop in Luxembourg in February 2026; this included first findings on the question of East-West German collaboration and the role of cybernetics as a DH precursor (Gengnagel/Schröter 2026; on cybernetics cf. also Zaagsma 2024: 472–473) as well as the East German connection to transnational perspectives (Zaagsma 2026).
Relevant for this paper are views expressed on operationalisation in the humanities. The ideological perspective is summarized by historian Alfred Loesdau at the IVth Historians Conference of the GDR in 1968: “A superficial and unconditional adoption of terms from a bourgeois ideology – often draped in a ‘scientific’ way – is to be rejected. [...] The cybernetic ‘de-ideologisation’ entails, as a last consequence, the abandonment of socialist ideology.” (Loesdau 1969: 16, transl.) He does clarify that this does not mean that new disciplines can be rejected outright, rather that they should be applied critically in service of the preferred ideological framework (an attempt at which had been made in Klaus / Schulze 1967). These sentiments are echoed in discussions about modelling historical information which directly voice their opposition to supposedly ‘value-free’ approaches taken in the West and instead advocate for value-based data modelling determined by class interests (Heymann / Wick 1972: 459).
Despite similarities in their ideological baselines, historians in the GDR adhered to them to different degrees, depending on their institutional background. While Alfred Loesdau was a party loyalist, historians at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR are said to have been more “ideologically flexible” (Fischer / Heydemann 1988: 16). This arguably shows in publications by Peter Wick (e.g. Wick 1977), head of the Department of Information and Documentation at the Central Institute for History, who was sympathetic to the idea of computer application. In an internal report, he notes benefits of working with quantitative methods and analyzes the types of such research under way at the time, with the majority of recorded works in all countries focusing on economic history, the USSR specifically on agricultural history, the USA on political history, and France on anthropological studies (Wick 1973: 4). His report suggests that both the institutional background of scholars as well as national interest and access to research literature impacted their ability to engage in humanities computing.
While this provides only a brief window into a very complex and diverse set of circumstances, developments, and practices, it does indicate that ideological undercurrents inside and outside of the GDR played a significant role in the type of knowledge work undertaken and the permission structures that emerged in order to do so.
All knowledge and knowledge production is situated (Haraway 1988). This places seemingly isolated phenomena within (invisible) structural patterns. One such phenomenon is the emergence of Computational Humanities Research (CHR) as a dominant sub-field within DH. It has been acknowledged that there was a sense of unease in the field in late 2019 and early 2020 regarding the founding of the CHR Conference (Lang 2020, 2027; Dombrowski 2022). This paper revisits and contextualises that moment within a longer history, and proposes to understand it through the lens of feminised labour.
Concepts such as Stephen Shapin’s “invisible technician” (Shapin 1989, 1994) and Klaus Hentschel’s work on “unseen hands” in scientific production (Hentschel 2008) serve as entry points for examining overlooked forms of labour in DH (Ross / Pilsch 2019, 2022). The historical exclusion of certain forms of labour from academic recognition is well-documented. Ann Blair, for instance, has shown how early modern scholars justified and conceptualised delegating information processing tasks to assistants (Blair 2010), thus relying on the labour of others for their scholarly work, much like we nowadays conceptualize outsourcing certain tasks to AI. There is also a long history of women being associated with auxiliary or unskilled forms of feminised labour: The enduring trope of the lone (male) genius reinforces such hierarchies and continues to shape the distribution of scholarly credit (Nyhan 2022b), a dynamic theorised by Margaret Rossiter as the Matilda Effect (Rossiter 1993) and demonstrated on examples of early computing history in general (Hicks 2017) and DH in particular (Terras / Nyhan 2016; Nyhan 2022a, 2023).
The hack vs. yack debate, though ostensibly about methodology, similarly functioned as a mechanism of exclusion particularly for feminist and critical scholarship (Nowviskie 2014: 70; Smithies 2022: 114). These exclusions are perpetuated in DH historiography, with the essential contributions of Roberto Busa’s female punch card operators systematically overlooked in both contemporary accounts and later historical treatments (Nyhan 2023: 134–135). This pattern reflects broader cultural associations of technical competence with masculinity and of support work with devalued feminised labour. Eichmann-Kalwara et al., in their analysis of ADHO submissions, observed that feminised topics were disproportionately underrepresented among accepted papers, irrespective of authorship (Eichmann-Kalwara et al. 2018).
This fundamental tension resurfaced with the creation of the Computational Humanities Research (CHR) conference series. CHR was intended as an inclusive space for computationally oriented work, yet critics have argued that it represents a narrowing of DH’s intellectual agenda that risks reasserting masculinised and positivist standards of assessment (Lang 2020, 2027; Dombrowski 2022). While its emphasis on reproducibility and model-building is not explicitly exclusionary, the tradition to which it appeals implicitly deprioritises ‘datawork’ (Alvarado 2022) and feminist methodologies. Humanities computing, particularly in its early formation, had been positioned as an escape from cultural and feminist theory (Boyles 2018: 94), and CHR can be viewed as a continuation of such epistemic divisions, if previously observed mechanisms in DH hold true.
The micro-studies that we present are embedded in discussions far beyond the scope of this abstract. However, we assert that they point towards questions of structural understanding that help to illumine paths towards reconciling DH histories and present (in terms of narratives, but also in terms of reflection). Our investigations show that research is required to differentiate the situatedness of DH within different times, places, even institutions and networks, in order to understand its relation to and positionality within societal frameworks of knowledge production. Approaching current DH practice through the concept of knowledge work serves to highlight its intellectual dimensions even when situated within laboratory-like or service-oriented environments, which is immediately relevant for the question of labour (Boyles et al. 2018; Magis 2018), scholarly contribution (Nowviskie 2011), and infrastructure (Pawlicka-Deger / Thomson 2024). Particularly opaque, even if at times glaringly obvious, is the instrumentalisation of political arguments to shape discourses of opposition, themselves conditional on contexts that we sometimes only examine with the distance of historical interest.
Contextualizing moments in DH history, near or far, provides plausibility. It does not, on its own, allow for sweeping statements about the discipline. If anything, it complicates the notion that such statements can and should be made, or at least be made with simplistic intent. What it does point towards are: the need for differentiation in thinking about DH histories, means of DH production, and visions for DH futures.