Drucker’s The Digital Humanities Coursebook presents digital humanities not as a toolkit of neutral techniques, but as a critical practice in which computation must remain answerable to interpretation, ambiguity, cultural specificity, and ethical judgement. Its central proposition is that digital research emerges through the relation between materials, processing, and presentation, yet every transition across this workflow—remediation, datafication, modelling, analytics, interface design, preservation—transforms the object of study rather than merely transmitting it. The argument develops against the misconception that digital methods can replace humanistic inquiry: computational tools augment scale and speed, but they also encode assumptions, biases, exclusions, and institutional priorities. Drucker’s case synthesis lies in the project scenarios she provides, where collections of photographs, Indigenous artefact records, ballads, maps, audiovisual archives, or pilgrimage-site documentation must be converted into tractable data through decisions about metadata, intellectual property, privacy, cultural ownership, format, labour, and sustainability. This reveals that data are made, not found, and that interface is not decorative but argumentative, since display structures what users can see, compare, query, and value. The conclusion is pedagogical and political: responsible digital humanities requires neither technophilia nor refusal, but a disciplined fusion of making and critique, ensuring that automated systems are redirected towards humanistic capacities for interpretation, documentation, equity, and reflective judgement.
