I too have met the dichotomy you speak of, between the instrumental and the knowledge-for-knowledge’s-sake views of the humanities. It’s an issue about which people feel passionately, so it’s not surprising that people often end up articulating their views in such binary terms. But I am not convinced that it needs to be a dichotomy. The fact that DH teaches skills that will be useful in the workplace need not diminish its extraordinary ability to generate insights, sharpen and transform existing analytical tools, better contextualise existing research, and, in short, to allow us to pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake (and, if we’re lucky, to derive enormous pleasure from doing so). Indeed, the more I work with graduate students the more it strikes me that the rather prosaic skills such as communication skills, the ability to work collaboratively, IT literacy and so forth are precisely those that one needs in order to succeed in a research career. So – although I realise that you aren’t the one drawing it, merely remarking on its existence – the duality between the academy and the real world seems to me an unhelpful one, and one that DH is conceptually useful in helping to undermine.

There is also an extent to which one needs to be strategic in working with, rather than against, the discourse of the world in which we hope to make our interventions. I’m delighted that, by giving my undergraduates some so-called “real world skills” via a DH course, they might be taken more seriously by a world which delegitimises the study of the humanities, and they may go on to get precisely those kinds of jobs in finance, government, business and so on that not only require the kind of critical thinking skills that appear to have been in rather short supply in the run-up to the various global and regional financial crises of recent times, but that also create the conditions of possibility for a more equitable world. I don’t teach my students critical thinking and close analysis specifically so they can go out and get these jobs, but if some of them end up going into these fields and exercising the critical muscles they learnt to flex while doing textual analysis in my classroom – either using DH methodologies or more conventional humanistic ones – then that is something to be happy about.

I do agree that we won’t understand the full import of the challenge DH poses to the humanities for quite some time. Perhaps not in our lifetimes. But, until then, what a ride it will be.