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This chapter considers the criticism most frequently leveled at digital humanities, the so-called “Where’s the beef?” question—that is, what questions does digital humanities answer that can’t be answered without it? What humanities arguments does digital humanities make? It acknowledges that digital humanities must eventually make arguments and answer questions. However, digital humanists need time to articulate their digital apparatus, to produce new phenomena that they can neither anticipate nor explain immediately. At the very least, they need to make room for both kinds of digital humanities, the kind that seeks to make arguments and answer questions now, and the kind that builds tools and resources with questions in mind, but only in the back of its mind and only for later.

This chapter assesses the field of digital humanities. It cites the absence of a definition of digital humanities, as well as a lack of connection among the different groups of digital humanists beyond a shared interest in texts and the use of computational technologies to explore and understand them. But more important, none of these groups has successfully demonstrated to the wider community of humanists that there are essential and irreplaceable gains to be had by applying digital tools to the project of interpreting (and reinterpreting) the human record for the edification of society. The chapter argues that the digital humanities, as both a broad collection of practices and an intense, ongoing interpretive praxis generative of such practices, is best thought of as having two very concrete but equally elusive dimensions. On the one hand, the digital humanities comprises something very much like a curriculum, an interrelated collection of subject domains and resources that, as a whole, contributes to both the construction of knowledge and the education of people. The second and more important dimension is that center of gravity is not a particular assemblage of technologies or methods but the ongoing, playful encounter with digital representation itself.

Over the last several decades, scholars have developed standards for how best to create, organize, present, and preserve digital information so that future generations of teachers, students, scholars, and librarians may still use it. However, the needs of people with disabilities have been neglected for the most part. As a result, many of the otherwise most valuable digital resources are useless for people who are—for example—deaf or hard of hearing, as well as for people who are blind, have low vision, or have difficulty distinguishing particular colors. This chapter considers the somewhat arbitrary concept of disability and assistive technology; argues why the digital humanities community should adopt a universal design approach; explains what a universal design approach would look like; and then offers suggestions for collaborative projects that should be undertaken by digital humanists.