This week my Racing the Beam co-author and platform studies series co-editor Nick Montfort spoke at the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science. In addition to discussing the two new platform studies titles shipping this spring, Nick reports that he met Perry Collins, a a new program officer for the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. Here's Nick's summary of his own complaints about the idea of "digital humanities," which I'm sorry I have never heard in complete form:

This was Perry's first trip outside the Washington, D.C. metro area, and she immediately (first talk of the colloquium) got to do something all of her colleagues at the ODH -- Brett Bobley, Jason Rhody, Jennifer Serventi -- have already done: listen to me complain about the prevailing, overly traditional, overly narrow model of the digital humanities that doesn't embrace contemporary work and the expressive, creative power of computational media. There are some things to enjoy about being a gadfly, but I do wonder if I've now become a hazing ritual at the National Endowment for the Humanities.