How should human values be integrated into the studies of digital qualitative research? This chapter proposes an answer to this question. It discusses the implications for qualitative researchers of human values in a digital-first world. In a digital-first world, digital technologies are simply taken for granted, and people see the world through digitally computed reality. The chapter offers a way to address the question of including human values in qualitative research in a digital society. It provides basic definitions of key concepts and illustrates them using practical examples of how human values are informing digital research from cultural, spiritual and Indigenous perspectives. As the diversity of human values contributes to the richness of meaning and everyday experiences, it is hoped that scholars and students of digital technology will examine, describe and integrate those values in their research. It is suggested that integrating human values in qualitative studies can contribute to interdisciplinarity in research.

Rather than promoting a death wish for the digital humanities, this chapter questions what comes after the labor of a single, reluctant digital humanist -- one who is coming to terms with his own privilege as a white, Western, male academic. In a seven-part requiem, I reckon with the scholarly methods I have championed over the span of a career and recommend a conceptual turn that encourages digital humanists to build things off-screen. To supplant the Promethean conception of “building” as the apotheosis of a tool-making animal, I put forth both a theory and method of “inclination,” based on the work of Adriana Cavarero. A motto such as “Real Humanists Make Tools” expresses the bravado of Homo Erectus, but I want to speculate about a new proto-human(ist) figure: Homo Inclinus. This figure follows its inclinations, embraces its finitude, pays attention haptically, and bends toward the other in acts that can be at once empathetic, generous, playful, erotic, and philosophical.