The Digital Humanities community is progressively raising its profile, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. As French citizens and continental Europeans, we are invited by our US counterparts to establish our position and participate in the development of the discipline. How can we contribute?
There are several ways. The traditional method of holding conventions and creating an international society of experts seems unsuitable in this situation, firstly because the community is too widespread, too fragile, and has not yet identified its potential members; secondly, because Digital Humanities is still in its early days and is by nature wide-ranging. Imposing a rigid structure at this early stage might have the effect of setting permanent yet unstable foundations for the discipline and bringing about artificially induced obsolescence. What we need is not institutionalisation, but rather invention and co-invention.