A Farewell to Foucault? Some Thoughts on the Diffusion (?) of Digital Humanities

This short paper shares some reflections on the − perceived − implications of Digital Humanities for conventional humanities routines. It begins by sketching the academic response to the introduction of digital and computational techniques and tries to gauge their impact in terms of (1) paradigm shift or (2) diffusion: should we qualify DH as a fundamental methodological revolution, or hail it as an instrumental, technological opportunity? Secondly, it raises the question of how to square the demands of empirical-analytical methods with the critical constructivist ethos that has informed much of the humanities. If opting for DH means choosing positivism over interpretivism, what does this mean for positionality and the deferral of meaning? And if applying digital methods to large diachronic datasets allows us to turn from the momentary and the unique to the gradual and the average, what does this mean for the way we understand historical change and agency?