DH Pedagogy in Ireland as Neo-liberal Logic or Social Opportunity?

To what end do we teach Digital Humanities? A significant particularity of the so-called “DH moment” (see Gold 2012a) is the rise of discipline-specific courses designed to make DH more than a bit part of larger curricula. But what does it mean to pursue and acquire a DH qualification or degree? One of the major charges against DH is the part that it has played in the increasing neo-liberalisation of the academy (Allington et al. 2016). There is perhaps some merit to this, in that many DH methods privilege quantification as a means of interpretation through measurement, an ethos which, deservedly or otherwise, has garnered much controversy (Marche 2012). If computer-assisted tools and methods privilege such logic, what is the contribution of dedicated DH programs to the political structure of higher education, or, put differently, when we teach DH do we teach neoliberal logic? This paper will seek to answer this question, examining the extent to which DH programs propagate neo-liberal logic, while also exploring their potential to provide a socio-economic opportunity to a generation of graduates tasked with living in the age of late capitalism. Using the development of the DH program at the University College Cork (UCC) as a case study, this paper will look beyond the what of the DH degree, focusing instead on why such programs might present true value and utility within a contemporary context, filling one of the major gaps in recent treatments of the field’s failings—class.