Continuing with the Alan Liu article I find the passage at the end of his introduction to the various sub headings very interesting. He is basically saying the digital humanities are not yet ready to fully respond to the various demands being made of it. He sites a "lack of adequate critical awareness of  the larger social, economic and cultural issues at stake", On one side of the field descending from humanities computing, a lack of "almost all cultural-critical awareness" whilst on the side descending from new media studies are "indiscriminately critical of society and global information 'empire' without sufficient focus on specifically institutional, higher education issues at stake".This amounts to a lack of protection against "postindustrial takeovers of the digital idea along the lines of fantasied 'eleventh campuses that merge educational, social and for-profit motives without weighing the need for the evolution of differences, and not just similarities between higher education and other stakeholder institutions in today's knowledge economy". Maybe a lot of the issues stem from the fact that the terms of reference of digital humanities are so broad and lacking definition. As  in every emerging field positions are polarised. I refer to the passage from 'a report on the state of the digital humanities', where Liu talks about text encoding and code work(p14) , code being increasingly linked to the ideas of technology and media.Thus  for example, digital humanists and new media scholars have begun conceptualising protocols and databases as fused constructs of encoded information, technology and media". This is somewhat offset against Lev Manovich's declaration that the two are "natural enemies".

The description of early shortcomings of digital humanities in 'Integration with the past' (p15) describes scholars as "historically schizophrenic operating "Presentist issues or practises of technology-media-information from the mid-twentieth century onwards" whilst focusing on "historical objects of study to which the new technological ,media and informational approaches were applied".This is highlighted in the example of the 3D interactive overlay of Dante Gabriel Rossettti's studio. It would appear that the effect was to draw the attention away from the intent of the exhibit and to focus attention on the cutting edge technology. This is an example I can readily relate to. I have been to several museums where the power of the material on view has been so compromised in an attempt to make it interactive. This trend seems to be applied to exhibits indiscriminately at museums and galleries where curater's seem incapable balancing the need to use technology with the strength of the material on display. Too often the exhibit is dumbed down to facilitate interactive technology.

In 'Rejoining the social' (p17) I particularly like the passage describing "Generations of literary scholars following the lead of the New Critics in de-emphasizing the communicative function of discourse. This was the price that had to be paid to stand up to what the New Critics saw as the hegemony of referential meaning in the age of science (and secondarily, of mass media)". The idea the a poem has something to say that could somehow be formulated into some kind of "science like proposition"And yet these critics are influencing generations of literary scholars and turning attention to "linguistic structures so ambiguous or 'paradoxical' that they were not communicative". This suggests to me the constant 'rejection of what has gone before',  in order to promote or and defend ones own position. Throughout history new ideas have been rejected by the established view while the establishment must be rejected in order to justify the new.
In the final part 'A critique of the digital humanities' I am drawn to the passage dealing with "data aesthetics. Liu suggests that there is much work to do in the "attention to the aesthetic and affective experience of processing and harvesting data". Again "One has only to view any typical data visualisation from the text-oriented side of the digital humanities, to recognise the near -total imaginative poverty of the field in crafting an aesthetics of data.
So it seems there are very significant challenges ahead. There are a so many facets to this field of study, and a lot of this document that I don't have enough understand of at this time, to feel able to make more in depth comment on. So I will close here and go back and re read the paper.