Daejeon, July 27–31
In Losing Faith in the Humanities (2019) and a recent expansion of his thoughts (2025), Simon During frames the current crisis of the traditional humanities (TH) in a historical panorama drawing on the history of religious secularization as an analogy to reopen the space for strategic reflection. This article proposes extending During's analytical framework to the digital humanities (DH) and to a question which neither account addresses: what the decline of TH means for DH itself.
The erosion of the humanities in terms of public relevance, educational policy support, cultural capital, and student and academic appeal is by now hardly disputed - even if its scope and causes vary considerably across linguistic and national contexts (Donoghue 2008, Reitter / Wellmon 2021, Schmidt 2018). The slow, incremental nature of this degradation produces a corresponding erosion of attention, diagnostic acuity, and institutional resistance. During's proposed remedy is to think at a larger scale, in resonance with a broader strand of cultural diagnosis (Eagleton 2014, Fessenden 2011, Scruton 2006).
"I want to propose that such big thinking might begin with the idea that, in the West, secularization has happened not once but twice. It happened first in relation to religion, and second, more recently, in relation to culture and the humanities. [...] We now live in a doubly secularized age, post-religious and postcanonical. The humanities have become merely a (rather eccentric) option for a small fraction of the population." (During 2019)
The first secularization concerns religion, whose social dominance was weakened by Enlightenment, political modernization, and social differentiation, giving way to its optionalization rather than abolition, with theology losing its status as a guiding discipline in the process. During observes a parallel development in the humanities. What was once regarded as civilizational heritage, the canon of “the best that has been thought and said” (Arnold, as cited in During 2019), has been losing its normative force, leaving behind archival residues, specialized research without a broader public, and diminished symbolic authority.
Cultural secularization thus mirrors religious secularization in its structural logic: the loss of authoritative centers, the dissociation of norm and practice, and the erosion of institutional sponsorship. The humanities emerged as functional heirs to religion, promoting their own modes of meaning-making, including canon formation, critique, and education, embedded in a liberal-secular metaphysics of human dignity, autonomy, and cultural heritage. Figure 1 maps this parallel decline, charting its protagonists and antagonists alongside their attributed functions and the open question of DH's positioning within it.
A note of caution accompanies the analogy, as its value lies less in structural equivalence than in enabling dispassionate strategic reflection on possible responses, which a common rhetoric of urgency tends to foreclose (During 2019). In line with the DH 2026 conference motto, this lens shifts attention from individual datasets and projects to the question of overall engagement with the humanities as a cultural project and to the broader dynamics of meaning loss affecting the “memory of the world” as a whole. This process is further accelerated by two more recent forces: the displacement of slower cultural forms through dopamine-driven platform culture (Gioia 2024) and AI's encroachment on practices once exclusive to humanistic inquiry (During 2025), joining neoliberalism, specialization, and decolonial and feminist challenges to the canon among the drivers of the second secularization.
Assessing DH's situation under the conditions of a second secularization requires first mapping the symbolic and epistemic terrain it occupies. Obviously, the relationship between DH and TH is complex and contested, and the range of possible responses to TH's decline depends considerably on where within that relationship a given project, institution, or community of practice is already positioned. While many DH actors present themselves in a pragmatic register — as methodological supporters, technical enablers, or neutral mediators — they operate within a cultural architecture historically established by TH and continue to benefit from its symbolic capital. With their instrumental orientation, DH practitioners typically do not determine what counts as culturally, aesthetically, or socio-politically valuable, but rather promise to investigate the textual and cultural records in which such values are inscribed more efficiently, systematically, or at scale.
In practice, DH draws on largely the same symbolic resources as TH: digitizing and curating canonical texts, visualizing power and gender relations in historical sources, developing interfaces for cultural heritage, linking archival traces, or pursuing established humanities questions through text enrichment and annotation. The temple is not abandoned, nor are its deities questioned — yet the internal economy shifts considerably, replacing the learned priest with the data-processing developer and moving attention from meaning to function, from hermeneutics to infrastructure, from Bildung to usability. Notably, DH also entered the scene early with a new generation of distant reading and viewing tools enabling canon critique and relativization (Moretti 2000), generating considerable academic resonance while simultaneously contributing to a weakening of the value-conserving and meaning-sustaining mission of TH. This ambivalence runs through DH's subsequent development and is far from resolved.
Against this background, different modes of coexistence between DH and TH can be identified. Figure 2 outlines five ideal-typical forms of interaction and cohabitation. These modes are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. In practice they often overlap within individual projects and institutional settings, and DH is itself already internally differentiated across sub-disciplines and factions whose responsive strategies may diverge. Nevertheless, the typology helps clarify the ideological relationship space in which DH currently operates and the range of symbolic commitments — explicit or implicit — that different orientations entail.
The mode of relationship that DH predominantly adopts today shapes its future options under conditions of second secularization. Should TH continue to lose symbolic and institutional authority, DH will face strategic questions that go beyond technical capacity: Will it become a workbench without work? A digital infrastructure for a high culture that has lost its public relevance? Or might it engage in forms of succession work, contributing to the emergence of new, hybrid-digital symbolic orders?
Four response categories organize the space this talk proposes to map.
Figure 3 maps these four orientations along axes of normativity, future orientation, and attachment to the humanities' symbolic heritage. Each presupposes a conscious strategic choice rather than an inevitable trajectory, and in practice individual projects and institutions will occupy mixed or shifting positions across them.
With the advance of the second secularization, questions about DH's relationship to its symbolic partner disciplines and its own cultural role become increasingly hard to defer. A productive response will require DH to step into debates about cultural value it has largely left to others, engaging custodians of humanistic traditions, designers of culturally resonant infrastructures, and advocates for the institutional relevance of cultural knowledge as genuine normative interlocutors. To recall Mahler's distinction: DH can pass on the fire of tradition, or it can administer the ashes. Which it chooses will say something about whether DH understands itself as a cultural project or merely a technical one.