Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"Digital Humanities is a Spectrum; or, We're All Digital Humanists Now"
Digital humanities is a spectrum. To put it another way, all humanities scholars use digital practices and concepts to one degree or another, even those who do not identify as digital humanists. Working as a digital humanist is not one side of a binary, the other side of which is working as a traditional scholar.
Moving from these practices to the digital humanities is a difference of degree, not of kind. It's only one step from searching Word documents to using Zotero and from there it is only a few more steps to text mining. A scholar who uses online digital collections is that much closer to curating an online collection, perhaps using Omeka.net. A professor who can post readings to Blackboard can create a course website using WordPress. Circulating papers for comment via e-mail might be a second cousin to posting your manuscript online for comment, but the two types of review are related.
In the age of information technology, we're all Digital Humanists on some level. Even if you're doing something as simple as searching a PDF document of an article for a certain word, you're getting your Digital Humanities on. Even if all you're doing is putting some course materials on a website, you're also gettin' down with the D.H.
The point is that it's not so easy to draw a sharp distinction between "traditional scholars" and "Digital Humanists." Any scholar in this day and age uses digital resources to some degree to do his or her work. Even if you're not going all out and programming all kinds of complicated computer software to help you do research in new ways, you're still acting like a Digital Humanist whenever you turn that computer on.