Towards a cultural critique of the Digital Humanities

In this article I try to articulate a critical assessment of the current geopolitical asset of Digital Humanities. This critique is based on one hand on data about the composition of government organs, institutions and principal journals of the field, and on the other hand on a general reflection on the cultural, political and linguistic bias of digital standards, protocols and interfaces. These reflections suggest that DH is not only a discipline and an academic discourse dominated materially by an Anglo-American élite and intellectually by a mono-cultural view, but that it lacks a theoretical model for reflecting critically on its own instruments. I conclude proposing to elaborate a different model of DH, based on the concept of knowledge as commons and the cultivation of cultural margins, as opposed to the present obsession with large-scale digitization projects and “archiving fever” that leads to an increase of our dependency on private industry products and, of course, funding.