DHd 2026 Panel - Fr 11 am

The Dark Sides of DH revisited: From Utopia to Reality

Matthias Arnold1, Alíz Horváth2, Sarah Lang3, Jonas Müller-Laackman4, Torsten Roeder5

1Universität Heidelberg; 2Central European University; 3Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Germany; 4SUB, Universität Hamburg; 5Uni Würzburg

This proposal takes up the concept of the “dark sides of DH,” which emerged as a disciplinary discourse about ten years ago (cf. Chun et al. 2016). However, we now adopt this once specific concept as a lens through which to examine current challenges facing the field. At the same time, we see these concerns not only as important problems, but also as opportunities and new frontiers. They can therefore be reframed as the bright sides of DH, since we, as a field, are in a position to take positive and proactive action in response. After approximately 45 minutes of discussion, we will open the floor to the audience to encourage dialogue within the community about how we can best tackle these issues, together leaning into the bright-side potentials of our field.

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dtEDeJD8NuM1r_ePbzVa8Dph4epZNRs24lRfTlpKvFM/edit?slide=id.g394195e9ced_2_3#slide=id.g394195e9ced_2_3 

History of the term “Dark Side of DH”  

  • Originally referred to neoliberalism as a central concern
  • series of debates that followed Stephen Ramsay’s influential 2011 Modern Language Association (MLA) talk, which gave rise to the well-known ‘Hack vs. Yack’ controversy (Nowviskie 2014).
  • foregrounded tensions between technical practice and critical reflection in DH a
  • By 2013 and 2014, panels at the MLA framed DH as a potential neoliberal takeover of the humanities, suggesting that DH was contributing to the marginalisation of critique and reinforcing precarious labour structures, focusing on “making” (like in the tech industry) while obscuring structural inequalities
  • 2016 publication of “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives)” by Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  • DH as complicit in the corporatisation of higher education, fetishising data and producing intellectually shallow work.
  • While the essay provoked considerable backlash, it nonetheless gave voice to widespread unease about DH’s institutional positioning and its perceived lack of sustained cultural critique.

The internal view of DH is often quite the opposite: that of a challenger of tradition norms somehow unaffected by structural issues that plague academia. The notion of vocational awe, first formulated by Ettarh and subsequently adapted to the context of DH by Melissa Terras (Borek et al. 2023), refers to the field’s often uncritical belief in its own intrinsic virtue. It is characterised by the assumption that those working within DH are inherently good and will therefore intuitively act ethically.  

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, Richard Grusin, Patrick Jagoda, and Rita Raley. “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, 493–509, 2016. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb.41 

Nowviskie, Bethany. “On the Origin of ‘Hack’ and ‘Yack.’” Journal of Digital Humanities 3, no. 2 (2014). https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-2/on-the-origin-of-hack-and-yack-by-bethany-nowviskie/.

Smithies, James. “The Dark Side of DH.” In Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities, 111–22, 2022. https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/publications/the-dark-side-of-dh/ 

For more details please refer to the long abstract in the Book of Abstracts
Schwandt et al. 2026. DHd 2026: Nicht nur Text, nicht nur Daten. Book of Abstracts  Wien, 2026, pp. 113-115. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18591948.

Short biographies of panelists

Alíz Horváth has a PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago (2019) and currently works as assistant professor of East Asian history and Digital Humanities at Central European University (Vienna, Austria). She is an avid advocate of linguistic diversity in digital humanities and serves as co-founder and chair of the DARIAH Multilingual DH Working Group. She is member of the Core Editorial Team for the DARIAH-IT sustained project, OpenMethods, member of the editorial board for Asia Pacific Perspectives, a topic editor of the Asian and Asian Diaspora studies section of Reviews in DH, member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of OPERAS, member of the Scientific Committee of the overlay journal Transformations, and former contributor to the pioneering NEH-funded project, New Languages for NLP, organized by Princeton.

Sarah Lang is Head of Digital Humanities at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Information Modelling at the University of Graz. Trained in History and Classics in Graz and Montpellier, she completed a PhD on early modern alchemical literature in 2021, combining Digital Humanities and the history of science, for which she received the Bader Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. As convenor of the Empowerment Working Group of the German Digital Humanities Association (DHd), where she is also on the board of directors, Sarah Lang is interested in issues like (gender) data gaps, data feminism, diversity in DH, decolonizing data, data ethics and related topics.

Torsten Roeder studied musicology and Italian and, on the side, spent (too) much time with computers. He subsequently worked on numerous DH projects and held temporary professorships at DH in Wuppertal and Rostock. Today, he works at Universität Würzburg at the Center for Philology and Digitality “Kallimachos”, where he oversees the area of digital editions and is building a retro-computing laboratory.

Jonas Müller-Laackman received his PhD in Libyan Arabic concentration camp literature and worked on several digital humanities projects at TELOTA/Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Free University of Berlin before becoming a consultant for Digital Scholarly Services at the State and University Library Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky, where he now heads the Digital Scholarly Services Department. As the co-founder of the DHd AG Multilingual DH and a co-opted member of the DHd board responsible for transdisciplinary outreach and representation, he is addressing the infrastructural, methodological and habitual gaps related to multilingualism in DH research and infrastructure. Beyond his interest in research infrastructure and academic technopolitics, he has worked on various topics, including the practices and rituals of German academia, the reception of dystopian and apocalyptic themes in popular culture, literature and games.