The field of Digital Humanities (DH), though formally established in the early 2000s, has roots that trace back to mid-20th-century computational efforts in the humanities. Its evolution reflects the growing integration of technology into the scholarship of the humanities--humanistic and otherwise--redefining how we analyze, preserve, and engage with cultural and literary artifacts.
The origins of DH are often linked to the pioneering work of Father Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit scholar. In 1949, Busa collaborated with IBM to create a computational concordance of the works of Thomas Aquinas. This project, considered one of the earliest applications of computers in the humanities, set the stage for what was then called Humanities Computing. Over the next few decades, the field focused on using computational tools to analyze texts, generate concordances, and develop databases, primarily in classical and literary studies.
The 1990s marked a turning point as the scope of computational humanities expanded beyond textual analysis to include multimedia, digital archiving, and web-based scholarship. This evolution brought about the rebranding of "Humanities Computing" as "Digital Humanities." A pivotal moment came with the publishing of A Companion to Digital Humanities in 2004, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. This landmark work helped define and consolidate the field, which was becoming increasingly interdisciplinary and inclusive.
Also in the 1990s, thinkers like Gregory Ulmer and Donna Haraway laid theoretical groundwork that would profoundly influence the emerging field of Digital Humanities (DH) by rethinking human subjectivity in the context of rapid technological change. Gregory Ulmer's work on hypertext explores how digital media transforms not only how we write but also how we think, learn, and construct meaning. Hypertext disrupts linear, hierarchical forms of thought tied to print culture, fostering instead a networked, associative logic that mirrors the digital world's interconnected structures. This shift calls for a reconfiguration of subjectivity, as Ulmer argued that writing practices fundamentally shape how individuals conceptualize their place in the world.
Meanwhile, Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto challenged traditional notions of human nature and ontology by presenting the cyborg as a metaphor for the blurred boundaries between humans and machines. Haraway argued that technology's integration into everyday life demands a rethinking of subjectivity, as human identities become hybridized and interconnected with technological systems.
Both Ulmer and Haraway emphasized that the digital world requires new theoretical frameworks to address the ways technology reshapes not only cultural practices but also the essence of being human. Their work set the stage for DH to interrogate how digital technologies are not just tools but transformative forces that redefine knowledge, identity, and ontology in the digital age.
By the early 2000s, Digital Humanities had become an institutionalized field with dedicated academic programs, journals such as Digital Humanities Quarterly and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and major conferences organized by groups like the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) also played a significant role in funding DH projects, further cementing the field’s place in academia.
The ascendency of artificial intelligence (AI) in the last two decades has profoundly impacted the evolution of Digital Humanities (DH), introducing transformative possibilities and critical challenges. AI’s capabilities in natural language processing, machine learning, and pattern recognition have enabled DH scholars to conduct large-scale analyses of textual, visual, and multimedia datasets, uncovering patterns and insights that were previously unattainable. This integration of AI into DH allows for more sophisticated archival organization, metadata generation, and cultural trend analysis. At the same time, AI raises theoretical and ethical questions about authorship, agency, and interpretation as algorithms increasingly influence the production and curation of knowledge. Scholars such as Johanna Drucker, Ted Underwood, and Matthew Jockers have explored these intersections, emphasizing the implications of AI for DH methodologies, the broader humanities, and beyond. Drucker critiques the assumptions embedded in computational systems, while Underwood's work focuses on machine learning, literary analysis, and Jockers pioneered large-scale text mining in literary studies (he is also exploring using AI for literary production). Together, their work highlights the importance of critically engaging with AI as a cultural and epistemological force within DH.
In the pedagogical realm, AI’s impact on DH extends into the classroom as educators grapple with its potential for both enhancement and misuse. At Oregon State University (OSU), for example, Ehren Pflugfelder and Joshua Reeves have published “Surveillance Work in (and Teaching) Technical Writing with AI” on incorporating AI into classroom practices by privileging ethical and creative uses of AI for academic work--promoting what they call C.A.R.E. framework (Critical, Authorial, Rhetorical, Educational)--over policing students' misuse of AI. This framework promotes the productive use of AI in learning by teaching students to critically analyze AI systems and apply them ethically rather than the teachers focusing solely on policing their use as if their students' relationship to AI is necessarily unethical--and as if using AI during the writing of their research papers is now avoidable. By fostering transparency and responsibility, OSU’s approach aligns with DH’s broader goals of leveraging technology for inclusive and innovative scholarship while also acknowledging the power that technology has in shaping us at our core.
Derrida's Archive Fever as a Freudian Trace and a (Non)Origin of Différance for the Digital Humanities
Returning to the 1990s, Derrida, and psychoanalysis, Derrida's 1994 book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, through its focus on the transformation of memory and knowledge via technological mediation—and like Ulmer and Haraway—foresaw the establishment of DH in the university. Derrida highlights that archiving, in general, has never been and will never be neutral: it is always a selective process that preserves some aspects of memory while excluding others.
In other words, and for emphasis, these archival efforts, throughout history, have fundamentally reshaped how knowledge is remembered and valued, transforming the “memory base” of human culture and therefore transforming humans.
Canonicity, the process by which certain works are selected, preserved, and deemed worthy of cultural or academic importance, has been central to the establishment of libraries throughout history. Libraries have traditionally served as repositories of the canon, institutionalizing these selections and granting them legitimacy by inclusion. This process inherently reflects power dynamics, as the determination of what constitutes "canonical" knowledge often privileges dominant cultural narratives while marginalizing others.
An example of this can be found in DH itself as traditional and humanistic approaches to DH are privileged over what I call "radical DH" approaches to DH that acknowledge "the truth of the digital unconscious" (to paraphrase and update Lacan) in the discourse of the University.
DH democratizes the formation of canons, while radical DH puts traditional theories of subjectivity into play.
Digital Humanities (DH) disrupts and reshapes the traditional power dynamics of canonicity and other forms of "archive fever" by democratizing access to texts and challenging the exclusivity of traditional canons. Through digitization and open-access initiatives, DH enables the preservation and study of non-canonical works, often giving visibility to voices and cultures previously excluded from mainstream archives.
Furthermore, DH introduces computational tools that allow for large-scale analysis of texts, enabling new approaches to canon formation, such as identifying overlooked works or reevaluating the criteria by which canonicity is determined. What I call "canonical theory" (a part of literary theory) must adapt to this shift. DH fosters a pluralistic approach to cultural memory that destabilizes the hierarchical frameworks upon which traditional canons were built.
In this way, DH transforms canonicity from a static, institutionalized process into a dynamic and contested field of inquiry, reflecting a more inclusive and multifaceted understanding of culture and history. In the university context, DH takes on a role similar to that of literature departments in earlier eras, vying for influence over what constitutes the "memory base" of the humanities and, by extension, the "meaning base" of the humanities.
Derrida’s analysis--far ahead of its time in 1994, as with Ulmer and Haraway who were writing around the same time--speaks directly to the core issues of DH even before the field formally emerged. Derrida recognized the paramount importance of data storage and organization issues long before they became central to Digital Humanities. His exploration of the term arkhē—which signifies both "commencement" and "commandment"—underscores the intrinsic link between archiving and authority. In DH, this duality is evident in how traditional practices reinforce power dynamics by determining what is preserved and prioritized, shaping not only cultural memory but institutional authority as well.
The Double Fever of the Digital Humanities and the Ethics of Cyborgian Care
The subtitle of Derrida’s Archive Fever, “A Freudian Impression,” situates the text within the psychoanalytic framework of memory, repression, and the unconscious, offering a crucial layer of meaning. Freud’s theory of the unconscious posits that memories are always mediated, evaluated, repressed, and subject to return in altered forms. These mediation and evaluation processes all take place unconsciously and constitute the foundation of the human unconscious.
Derrida draws on these Freudian ideas to show that archives, like human memory, are inherently incomplete and haunted by what they exclude. The fever in Archive Fever is always at least double. Not only is it the compulsion to preserve, but also the anxiety about what is lost or repressed in the process. This Freudian lens illuminates how archiving is both an act of preservation and a confrontation with death—an attempt to stave off the decay and forgetting that finitude imposes on human existence.
This “fever” Derrida identifies refers to the anxieties and compulsions tied to archiving, which are deeply connected to the role of death in giving meaning. As human beings, our recognition of finitude and mortality imbues our memories with urgency, compelling us to preserve what might otherwise be lost. Archiving, then, becomes an ethical act grounded in the fragility of existence—a form of Derridean care. This care arises from the tension between preservation and loss, continuity and disruption, life and death. As Hägglund emphasizes in his radical atheism, finitude is central to the stakes of meaning and responsibility. Human memory, bound by the temporal flow of life and death, makes care and preservation urgent, while also giving life its ethical depth.
Cyborg memory disrupts this framework because the same finitude does not bind the technological "side" of the hybrid entity. Unlike human memory, which is embedded in temporal flows and haunted by mortality, cyborg memory operates in potentially infinite systems of storage, retrieval, and replication. This fundamental difference challenges the role of death and decay as central to meaning-making and ethical engagement, making the cyborg's meaning base different from the human's.
Cyborg memory’s ability to exist beyond human time complicates the stakes of preservation and introduces new questions about what and how we archive. If traditional archives wrestle with the Freudian dynamics of repression and return (the traditional double fever), cyborg archives introduce new forms of continuity and disruption that are no longer tied to human vulnerability (a second or even third fever). DH, by embracing digitization and cyborgian forms of memory, navigates this shift, blending humanistic concerns with the technological potential to extend memory, thinking, and, therefore, meaning beyond traditional human limits. This raises the question of whether meaning, as conceived through human finitude, can persist in a cyborgian framework.
Traditional DH tends to guard against these anxieties by prioritizing the stabilization and enrichment of humanities scholarship, often referred to as "humanistic scholarship," to exclude cyborgian scholarship and other forms of anti-humanistic scholarship like psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Here, DH turns on itself to preserve or privilege a traditionalist DH over a radical DH.
Traditional DH's focus—digitizing canonical texts, preserving institutional authority, and improving analytical tools—reflects an archival impulse to control and secure memory (the old fever). By doing so, traditional DH often avoids engaging with the more radical implications of digital technologies, such as how they destabilize authorship, challenge power structures, and question the boundaries of human subjectivity (the new second or third fever). These practices aim to shield the humanities and traditional DH, ironically, from the disruptive potential of technology. In this way, the internal conflicts of DH (its complexes or fevers) reflect a broader institutional struggle between traditional and radical aspects of DH—defining how DH should theorized and implemented, in addition to what will be preserved, remembered, and valued as the foundation of the humanities.
In contrast to traditional DH, radical DH embraces the fevers and messiness (or play) of the complexes, highlighting the playful, transformative, democratizing, and destabilizing possibilities of digital technologies and what Lacan might have called "the truth of the cyborg" if he had lived long enough (the discourse of the Techne?).
Radical DH doesn't just interrogate whose memories are archived and whose are excluded; it explores the fluidity of digital memory and acknowledges the vulnerability of digital archives to corruption or obsolescence. Radical DH also interrogates what we are talking about with the "human" of "humanities"—putting the nature (and non-nature) of the "human" in question.
Radical DH aligns with Derrida’s notion that archives are always “to come” (à venir), incomplete, and open to reinterpretation (an undecidable unconscious of the humanities of sorts). Freudian insights, Derrida argues, deepen this understanding, showing how archives are haunted by their exclusions, their repressions shaping their future returns. A combination of radical DH, deconstruction, and "cyborg-analysis" would posit that a cyborg "to come" with its boundaries between humans and technology is always "undecidable."
In other words, Radical DH doesn't just engage with "humanistic" humanities. It also engages with the broader implications of posthumanist thought, examining how technology alters not only what is remembered but also what or "who" is doing the remembering—that is, what it means to be a human who is more than just immersed in a digital world.
This is where the ethics of cyborgian care become relevant. Cyborg memory introduces a different kind of fever—one that is less about finitude and more about the possibilities and risks of infinite memory systems. Hägglund’s radical atheism, grounded in the stakes of finitude, must grapple with this new terrain, where the traditional boundaries of care, responsibility, and relationality are redefined. Cyborgian care emphasizes repair and iteration over permanence and preservation, challenging the human-centric ethical frameworks of traditional DH and human memory.
In the humanities, there is often a tendency to fetishize the "radical," elevating theoretical frameworks that push the boundaries of traditional disciplines without adequately addressing their practical applications. This tendency was a central concern in my critique, "Let Us Not Forget the Clinic," which expressed my hope that the radical theorists of psychoanalysis and deconstruction of my UU journal would remain grounded in the sites of care where their theories are practiced. For psychoanalysis, this is the clinic with its inescapably humanistic elements; for the humanities, it is the classroom with inescapably humanistic elements. These sites are where care, relationality, and ethical engagement take on tangible form, making it essential that theory remains accountable to the lived realities of those who inhabit these spaces. By neglecting these practical dimensions, radical theory risks losing its relevance and ethical grounding, leaving behind only abstract frameworks detached from the people and communities it purports to serve.
The ethics of cyborgian care underscores this need for balance by insisting that the humanistic elements of these sites of care must be integrated with the technological dimensions of the cyborg and DH. While the cyborg complicates traditional notions of subjectivity by blending human and machine, it remains anchored to the human element, which is finite and mortal.
Radical atheism continues to hold relevance in this context because the human part of the cyborg always dies, leaving only the machine. Without a "deus ex machina"—a spirit or animating force within the machine—the cyborg cannot exist as purely technological. This interplay between the human and the technological demands a nuanced ethical approach that respects both the embodied vulnerabilities of human beings and the transformative potential of technological augmentation. In this way, cyborgian care reminds us that even as we embrace the radical possibilities of theory, we must stay connected to the grounded, humanistic realities that give those theories meaning.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the tension between traditional and radical DH reflects the dual nature of archiving itself: the desire to preserve and stabilize memory collides with recognizing its inherent fragility and instability. Freud considered his theory of the unconscious a Copernican revolution. He told Jung and Ferenczi that he wondered if America knew they were "bringing them the plague" when they were bringing them the anti-humanistic, decentering discourse of psychoanalysis, what Lacan called "the truth of the unconscious." DH is also decentering and destabilizing as it transforms the conception of our cultural unconscious and its archiving process.
While traditional DH seeks to guard against the archive and cyborgian fevers by maintaining continuity and authority, radical DH leverages these fevers to rethink how cyborgian subjectivity and digital archives reshape memory, power, and subjectivity in an increasingly technologized world. This dynamic situates DH at the center of the university’s struggle to define not only the memory base of the humanities but also its evolving "meaning base" (the traditional domain of literature) as it grapples with the implications of finitude, technological supplementation, and cyborgian disruption.
In this struggle, Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, Ulmer's Text/Hypertext, and Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression offer a critical lens for understanding the ethical stakes of both traditional and radical DH. They remind us that every archive, whether human or cyborg, carries within it a trace of death—a haunting that shapes its meaning and its promise—the promise "to come." As Derrida foresaw, data storage and organization, now central to DH, remain paramount in shaping the future of memory and meaning within the humanities and beyond.
The internet and AI have profoundly amplified technology's influence on the humanities and human subjectivity, becoming central to debates about what defines the human and its connection to time, technology, memory, meaning, and mortality. As these technologies continue to evolve, they will not only increase the importance of Digital Humanities as a field but also raise the stakes of archiving by transforming how knowledge is preserved, accessed, and interpreted.
The unprecedented scale and speed at which information can now be generated and disseminated demand new frameworks for organizing and curating digital memory and AI, making DH pivotal in addressing questions of cultural preservation and epistemological integrity. Moreover, the ethical implications of AI’s role in determining what is remembered and what is excluded underscore the urgency of critically engaging with these technologies to ensure that archiving practices remain inclusive, transparent, and reflective of diverse human experiences. In turn, this reshaping of memory and preservation will deeply influence the ethics of cyborgian care, requiring a nuanced approach that balances the humanistic need for meaning and mortality with the technological potential for continuity and repair.
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