Martha Nell Smith - Computing: What Has American Literary Study To Do with It? - American Literature 74:4 American Literature 74.4 (2002) 833-857 Computing: What's American Literary Study Got to Do with IT? Martha Nell Smith [Figures] Two encounters, five years apart, inspired the question in my essay's title. The first one occurred in spring 1995, when the Dickinson Electronic Archives was launched. A long-term fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia had enabled the Dickinson Editing Collective to develop this hypermedia archive of the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson. By 1995, my colleagues in the University of Maryland English department had begun to hear that not only was I developing this scholarly Web site, and possibly a CD-ROM, but that I also planned to devote much of my intellectual energy to a critical digital edition of Emily Dickinson's correspondence. The most senior Americanist in the department, who had chaired the committee that hired me, stopped me in the hall. "What is it I hear you are up to?" he inquired. As I began to tell him about my work in digital studies, my excitement grew, but so did the furrows in his brow. He lowered his voice and, sotto voce, implored: "This is the English department, not computer science or mathematics. You will never be promoted to full professor doing this kind of work." Five years later, I was a full professor and director of the...