As Digital Humanities continues to grow and develop as a discipline, both in terms of its interdisciplinary work and the development of research questions specific to itself, there has emerged a number of controversies about its supposed nature. These critical voices have been articulated from a number of disciplinary traditions, but tend to be mostly from the humanities.

This talk will look at the developing field of digital humanities, and examine these sites of controversy in terms of the the changing nature of humanities research, partly due to the undoubted expansion of digital resources and digital scholarship more generally, but also in terms of the history and development of the field of digital humanities understood as somehow contrary to the humanistic pursuits of the university. This talk will look at a number of ways in which digital humanities does indeed suggest new ways of working for the humanities, but also how these can augment existing approaches, rather than necessarily being in opposition to them, but also why they raise such anxieties around the future of the humanities and the university in a digital age.

David M. Berry is Professor of Digital Humanities in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. He writes widely on computation and the digital and is the author of Critical Theory and the Digital, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age, Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, the editor of Understanding Digital Humanities and co-editor of Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design (with Michael Dieter). His forthcoming book in 2016 is Digital Humanities (with Anders Fagerjord).