Defining DH Values

In 2011, the US digital humanities (DH) community was caught up in debates about hacking versus yacking and whether a digital humanist needed to be able to code. But what if we asked instead what values unite the digital humanities community? This question led Lisa Spiro to write “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities”, which advocated for a community effort to define DH values and proposed an initial set (Spiro 2012). Developing these preliminary values required Spiro to synthesize ideas from publications on DH practices and culture, even as she acknowledged that this work should be carried out by people representing diverse perspectives rather than an individual. The essay was influenced by the values statements developed by organizations such as the American Library Association, which aid decision-making and signify what characterizes the professional community (Berg and Jacobs 2016). The essay proposed five values:

• Openness
• Collaboration
• Collegiality and Connectedness
• Diversity
• Experimentation

Since the essay’s publication in 2012, much has changed in both digital humanities and society as a whole. This presentation will bring together Quinn Dombrowski, a DH scholar who has led major DH organizations and initiatives, with Spiro to facilitate a larger conversation about DH values and how the essay might be reimagined to reflect changed contexts and evolving needs.

Reception and Impact

The essay seems to have resonated with many, perhaps because it was one of the first to grapple with the question of DH values. According to Google Scholar, it has been cited 384 times as of November 26, 2025; OpenAlex lists 143 citations. The topics of these works include minimal computing, open education, the history of digital humanities, DH pedagogy, DH and libraries, and more. The essay has also appeared on a number of DH syllabi, often as part of class sessions dedicated to introducing digital humanities. The range of references to this piece span the globe. Citations have come in a number of languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, German, Polish, French, Turkish, and Chinese.

By focusing on values rather than specific practices, the original essay leaves space for different interpretations. Over the past nearly 15 years, it has become more difficult to delineate “digital humanities” as a community distinct from partially-overlapping clusters of scholars who frame their work as computational humanities, data science, and AI, let alone the scholars doing traditional humanities work using the now-unremarkable technologies that have become commonplace (e.g. mapping, podcasting, etc.). Where technology fails as a way to meaningfully define the boundaries of “digital humanities” separate from, for example, “data science”, the initial essay and subsequent work in the same spirit continue to offer a compelling rallying cry for digital humanities, centered less on what we do than how -- or at least, how we aspire to do this work.

Revising DH Values

As the field has continued to evolve, later work has added important nuance to the initial set of values, along with potential new values. We would now revise the initial list of values as follows:

• Openness: While open source software and open access to information remain core to the goal of spreading knowledge, facilitating collaboration, and providing a flexible scholarly infrastructure, we must recognize the complexities around openness. For example, indigenous communities may want to restrict access to cultural information based on clan and family relationships or other factors. Hence Kimberly Christen and colleagues developed Mukurtu, a collection management system that supports different levels of access depending on the community’s preferences (Christen 2012). Recently, AI bots have crashed open access repositories because of their aggressive crawling, raising questions about open to whom and for what? We must invest in developing, scaling and sustaining open infrastructure, yet funds for anything besides development are hard to come by. Further, accessibility must be an aspect of openness so that all can use scholarly resources and infrastructure.
• Collaboration, Collegiality and Connectedness: Collaboration remains core to much digital humanities work, although it is important to recognize how much care, credit, communication, and planning are needed to manage productive and ethical collaborations (Clement et al. 2011). Sometimes students, staff, and other contributors do not get full credit or compensation for or authority over their contributions. Of course, what counts as “credit” differs depending on role and context, and not everyone is in a position to collaborate for free. Humanities people can find themselves in the position of being desirable as token disciplinary diversity on projects that don’t reflect our goals, values, or interests (e.g. data science research, AI proposals). Even outside the context of collaboration, collegiality and connectedness remain threads of DH culture worth naming and celebrating, as they offer an alternative to the “lone genius” model common elsewhere in the humanities. At the same time, connectedness has become more difficult than in the heyday of DH Twitter, as the community has fragmented across many platforms and messaging apps.
• Diversity: The last fourteen years have highlighted the importance of diversity to digital humanities, as Black DH, Feminist DH, Postcolonial DH, and Multilingual DH have gained prominence (Noble 2019; Risam 2016). Multiple perspectives, backgrounds, and areas of expertise contribute to the creativity and productivity of project teams. Nevertheless, diversity in DH still is often more aspirational than actual in terms of funding, opportunity, and access to infrastructure. Often people from underrepresented groups are not well-represented as leaders of projects or fully empowered to use DH tools in the ways that they would like to use them (e.g. poor multilingual support). We also recognize that this list of values is based on practices in Anglo-American DH and doesn’t necessarily reflect the experiences of the rest of the world. In an international research community, it is to be expected that cultural practices and norms will differ.
• Experimentation and Play: Experimentation sparks learning and the creation of new knowledge. We would expand this value to include play, reflecting the significance of making, gaming, and tinkering to digital humanities. This calls out a range of activities, some already well established in 2012, including electronic literature, game studies, makerspaces, and incorporating traditional, often feminine-coded, craft practices into DH. Even as we value experimentation, we should also acknowledge that the drive for innovation comes with costs, including the depletion of resources and, often, exploitative labor practices. Further, once an experiment turns into a product or service, it must be maintained. As Trevor Owens argues, we need to reject disruptive innovation in favor of maintenance, care, and repair-- valuing sustainability, networks of solicitude, and mending what is broken (Owens 2024). Maintenance also raises issues of responsibility. What happens if someone gets excited about and adopts something you have no intention of maintaining? What’s your responsibility to them?

Given developments both in digital humanities and in the society writ large, we suggest adding another value that reflect these changes:

• Social Engagement and Responsibility: Recent digital humanities projects such as Torn Apart / Separados, Mapping Inequality, and Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) apply DH tools, methods, and practices to urgent sociopolitical issues, using digital technologies to raise awareness of social injustices or preserve at-risk cultural heritage (Ahmed et al. 2018; Nelson; Dombrowski et al). In addition to advancing social responsibility through the topics that they explore, digital humanities practitioners can demonstrate responsibility in how their work is carried out, such as by following ethical practices in collecting and sharing data, accounting for algorithmic bias, pursuing equitable approaches to collaboration, or reducing the energy consumption of computation (Schreibman et al. 2024). As the climate crisis worsens and the environmental impact of computing becomes more evident, a value that includes environmental sustainability could help coalesce the DH community in addressing environmental challenges, building on the work of the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition.

While the original essay argued that a DH professional organization should develop a values statement, it is no longer clear that establishing such a list is needed or advisable, since doing so could require significant labor, cause friction due to cultural differences, contribute to a sense of exclusion, rapidly become outdated, and be performative rather than useful. However, we believe that discussing digital humanities values– whether in publications, conferences, classrooms, project meetings, or professional organizations– has helped the field to articulate what guides it and why it’s worth engaging with the digital humanities community. Further, such values can inform decision-making around the complex issues that confront us, such as using AI ethically, navigating the environmental impacts of computation, or determining fair labor practices (Berry 2022). To continue the conversation, we will invite participants in this conference session to contribute their own ideas about DH values via an online poll run during the session; we hope that engaging attendees at an international conference will enable multiple perspectives to be represented. Maintaining this discourse around values will help to shape the aspirations of DH as egalitarian, inclusive, and committed to social responsibility.