The concept of digital humanities is so loosely defined that at the moment it tends to absorb a number of other debates. In literary studies, for instance, the projects of surface reading and especially distant reading are often conflated with "DH," although computers play only a supporting role in much of this scholarship.
I want to consider this alignment of trends from two angles — acknowledging that it's partly an accident of public perception, but also trying to tease out a more substantive underlying rationale for it. Using a couple of examples from my own recent collaborations, I'll emphasize a curiously indirect but important way computers are contributing to the humanities right now: by making the quantitative social sciences more useful for humanists.
