The most important takeaway from the panel, from my perspective: many deans and other administrators have no idea that Digital Humanities and MOOCs (and/or other sorts of online pedagogy) are different things — and faculty/staff seeking funding often find it’s to their advantage to perpetuate the confusion. Basically, to many administrators, “digital”=something that will save, or perhaps even bring in, money (there is, after all, NEH funding for digital humanities projects). Even if faculty know they won’t be able to deliver on that promise, they have incentives, at least in the short term, for not shattering the illusion.

Later in the day, Bethany Nowviskie added some important points to the ongoing MLA conversations about both Digital Humanities and adjunctification with her talk “Resistance in the Materials,” which is available here: http://nowviskie.org/2013/resistance-in-the-materials/#more-1978 . Her ideas resonate with yours (in part because she’s riffing on William Morris). Her point #3 (that labor in the Digital Humanities, like teaching labor, is increasingly casualized) is important, especially in light of the tendency of humanists to see DH as a potential source of good jobs for humanities Ph.D.s Listening to her and a few other relatively longtime directors of DH programs in the last few months, my impression is that DH *did* create some good, interesting jobs for some talented Ph.D.s in the first few years of this century, and may continue to produce a few more such jobs in the next few years, but we’re soon going to reach a point where there are more DH centers than there is outside funding available, which will lead to retrenchment, and, even after some sort of balance is achieved, there’s going to be far more need going forward for cheap (though intelligent) laborers to do piecework than for people to fill Directors’ and other positions that involve the sort of strategic, analytic thinking that Ph.D.s are good at. The directors seem very aware of this — aware that others’ livelihoods are dependent on their getting grants, and that the jobs they will have to offer in the future will probably not be as good as the ones they’ve been able to offer in the past. This awareness may stem, in part, from the fact that their own jobs are less secure than those of their tenured counterparts (and no, as someone who supports tenure, I don’t really like the implications of that statement, but I still think it’s true).

In the long run, though the “dark side” panel will be remembered (if only for illuminating by, to some extent, embodying the confusion between Digital Humanities and MOOCs), I think Nowviskie’s talk is going to be seen as more important: a clear articulation of a landmark moment in the development of the Digital Humanities.