In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

posTcondiTions In many respects, digital humanities is a scholarly discipline like any other. It has, first and foremost, a community with a history. It also has books and journals, scholarly societies, yearly conferences, sources of funding, programs, curricula, students, faculty, and a vast network of scholars both traditional and nontraditional. In this respect, it is more or less like history, or English, or philosophy, or mathematics. In the early 1990s, when debates raged over whether digital humanities (or humanities computing, as it was then called) was, in fact, its own discipline, those who wished to reply affirmatively pointed to these institutional signs as evidence. We are a discipline, they argued, because we are just like all the others. Some, though, felt certain that we were not at all like the others. To start with, we were radically interdisciplinary. Our conferences, journals, programs , and networks consisted not only of people with backgrounds in all of the traditional humanities disciplines but from engineering, mathematics, and the sciences as well. What’s more, the community contained a great number of people who were not traditional research faculty at all (librarians and technical support staff, for example), many of whom were important leaders and innovators in the field. Humanities computing might be a meta-field, or a methodological commons, or a temporary vector for interdisciplinary collaboration, but it surely was not what most of us, in one way or another, had left behind. That we might have left something behind—with all the fear and uncertainty but also with the joy and liberation that entails—was undoubtedly one of the unacknowledged reasons for this discussion. Some people, who felt betrayed in one way or another by the disciplines in which they had been 84 Postconditions trained, were eager to plant a flag on the new shore. Others saw this as a way to revivify the tired discourses to which they still felt deeply attached. No one thought that what they were doing was a side interest or a sub-specialty. Embracing humanities computing was not the same as declaring a new theory to be central, redefining a canon, altering institutional constructs, or embracing a new methodology. It was not like distinguishing American History from European History or English Studies from Comparative Literature. Nor was it a purely methodological separation (though, as I have argued, strenuous attempts were made—and continue to be made—to represent the field as bringing the methodologies of science to the humanities). Humanities computing was part of—and, indeed, the result of—the same set of epochal changes that had produced the personal computer and at that very moment were in the process of producing the World Wide Web. What brought people together from across a startlingly diverse set of disciplines and professional roles was the shift from criticism to creation, from writing to coding, from book to tool. Humanities computing had its theorists, its administrators, its teachers, and its historians, but nearly everyone in the field was involved, in one way or another, with building something. The conceptual leap required to move from talking about novels to talking about Web sites or computer games requires subtle shifts in thinking and reappraisals of one’s assumptions. This remains a vital and fascinating area of investigation for students of new media. But it is nowhere near as jarring—or, frankly, as radical—as the shift from theorizing about games and Web sites to building them. It is true that text encoders often describe working with TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) as an act of interpretation and that builders of software systems have been known to describe their tools as enactments of theories. Yet there remains a world of difference between talking about the different parts of a text and physically separating them with XML tags—between talking about software and writing it. Neither using a map nor considering its status as a cultural representation is to be confused with GIS (geographic information system). The development meeting is not a seminar. At the same time, people who engage in this kind of building have the clear sense that they have not stopped being humanists or abandoned any of the concerns of the disciplines in which they work and were trained. Most of them came into the field because nothing provided the kind of affordances that are to be found in coding, marking, designing, and building. It is easy enough to describe digital humanities in practical terms as the creation of assistive technologies for...

Share