In reading Matt Kirschenbaum's essay: Digital Humanities As/Is a Tactical Term

I found it interesting that he provides a "little" history of the term, "digital humanities." How terms or titles get coined. In his essay, he points that it is all in the "timing." And he also points out that once a term is coined, that it is very hard to change it.

He also defines the term, media.

What I can concluded from his essay is that terms are modified. That terms are also not forever, they change. At first glance this might seem obvious, but looking closer one sees that this is not the case. He does make a good argument that there is an ever changing flow of perspective of a moving subject (in his case the digital humanities). Unless what one is studying is in the past, one cannot define it. Because it is ever changing. But then, the past is also being reinterpreted and being reinvented. So, terming or titling of an event is very difficult,

and so I submit that one then has to have an personal inquiry about the subject. In other words, do the scholarly work because you are genuinely interested and inquisitive about the subject matter of inquiring, but don't do it because you want a definitive answer. I find it that many scholars (or modes of inquiry and thinking) follow a cook-book recipe for a solution or solving it like a math problem. Like there is a solution at the end of the yellow-brick road. In no way should one try to derive to an answer, or to think of the humanities (or the digital humanities) as having a conclusion. If one does this, then one will run into major troubles. One will be like Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick (by Herman Melville). That you will be chasing a problem that has no solution. You might give it an ending or a solution, but it won't be a true solution.

So what one gets is a sense of a "Destabilizing category" (or categories). In a world that is pushed forward by technology and rhythmic order, anything that is arrhythmic and turbid is considered "bad" or unwanting. The shifting relationships between "us" and "them" are useful. And the self from the other are also good. Discomfort is inevitable. That no solution makes a better understanding of the categories at hand.

Bobbie Mendez (August 14th, 2013)