These chapters make clear that the digital humanities, rather than being a singular method or field of study in itself, represent a porous and ever-changing integration (and collaboration) of methods. Most important is the present notion of creating tools that can ethically and effectively document, preserve, and gain new insight into the cultural record, with the support of diverse forms of public knowledge being essential to work in this area. When considering the new digitization of historical cultural records, for example, we must identify those for whom these resources are made available, evaluate the validity of these sources, and ensure that scholars from varying disciplines can make interesting and unique use of them in specific contexts.

These chapters also make clear numerous obstacles that still exist in the digital humanities, and which may be representative of larger issues within the academic sphere. Diverse research perspectives among peer reviewers, publication channels, and academic institutions limits the reach of digital humanities work, as it does in any other field, but with the added understanding that digital humanities work is often much more diverse. Therefore, we must at every stage make certain to clearly document and describe the cross-utility of our research methods and findings, ensuring that our data and approaches are considered valid to a wide range of scholars in varying disciplines. These restrictions, to me, should really be placed on any research in any discipline. After all, as we have learned from the past several decades of interdisciplinary research, findings from almost any field can prove fruitful, interesting, and applicable to research in almost any other field; and yet, scholarly research is rarely made for a wide or universal audience for global access, understanding, and utility. Rather, research today is more often made accessible, and interpretable, only to those who already exist within that particular field of study: psychology research is written to be read by other psychology researchers, findings from biological papers are presented to be interpretable to other biologists, and so on. These chapters make clear the cross-utility intended by digital humanities research, which requires rigorous experimentation that takes into accounts the multiple languages, so to speak, of different forms of knowledge emerging from different fields, methods, and academic values that may find a unified place in discourse within the digital humanities. Likewise, we must make clear individual scholarly contributions within such projects, whose means and methods are likely to vary widely in form and function (e.g., literature review vs. programming work), acknowledging that crediting practices within the digital humanities are constantly in flux.

There are many other concepts touched upon in these chapters. Among them, it is prudent to note: (1) that the contemporary digital world makes necessary new forms of scholarly research evaluating human experience; (2) that digital humanities projects tend to provide numerous practical research benefits (e.g., cost-sharing between groups or institutions); and (2) the conceptual expansion of the classroom to include the project space (e.g., the museum space, library collections). To me, digital humanities represents an exciting frontier, and argument, for the dissolving of “party lines,” so to speak, that have traditionally disrupted interdisciplinary and holistic approaches to studying human experience. Rather than limiting our understanding of our research subjects by notions of field-specific validation methods, the digital humanities appear to provide opportunities, within the logical confounds of combined research methodologies, for novel insights drawn from experimentation and iteration between and among diverse fields.