In a blog post titled, “Digital humanities might never be evenly distributed,” Ted Underwood (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) considers the different ways in which digital humanities infrastructure, support, and collaboration work (or don’t work) across constituencies in institutions. He posits that DH can be understood “as an institutional achievement that happens to exist on some campuses and not others.” Underwood concludes with a prediction that institutions will do DH differently as a matter of local cultures and constraints.
The post is particularly relevant for librarians in that it describes the dispersed nature of DH activity on one (large) campus that is also home to a leading LIS program. It suggests that even without a centralized DH initiative, important successes in digital humanities can be found through the types of interdisciplinary connections and local attentiveness academic librarians engage as a part of our professional practice.
