The Future of Digital Humanities is a Matter of Words

The job I have been given is to take up the whole question of digital humanities and the digital mediation of knowledge among the various humanities disciplines with a view to what’s driving the change, where it is heading, and what the humanities might look like as a result – and what ‘‘new media’’ might mean in this context. I am tempted to ask ironically in return ‘‘Is that all?’’ The question is fascinating and needs to be asked, but where does one begin on such a vast and uncertain project? First, however, allow me to anticipate what I think an adequate response might be. For reasons I will explain, it could not be what we almost always get: a projection of current technical know-how into an imagined future. Rather, it would have to be a history written to address current predicaments in order to open up the complexity of the present as staging post for the future. Its historiography would have to look like a perpetual weaving and unweaving of many threads, or like a bird’s-eye view of a complex drainage system: strands of quite separate development or channels of diverse influence coming together and intermingling for a time before dispersing to mingle again elsewhere (cf. Mahoney 2011: 13, 57). These authors suggest that confronting these questions also means bringing as much as possible of that unspoken understanding into the light so that it may be implemented or used to guide the design of things to come. This is no simple matter: such understanding is tacit and, its behaviors show, so highly variable that only by virtue of subtle argument can we even get close to speaking of ‘‘human nature and human work’’ meaningfully. At the local level of the digital humanities, we have more than a half-century of work to draw upon. With this resource we can reasonably suppose that if we could only figure out how to be properly historical the discipline’s past could tell us enough about what this discipline is that we might then articulate its intellectual trajectory. Then, not only would we have a better purchase on its most promising futures but we would also know how to look for the help this emerging discipline needs and have reason on our side when we adapt promising theories and practices to its requirements. That gets us to the historical record, without which a forward-looking vision is likely to be a waste of time. But forming it into a genuine history is also a challenge: no one has yet done it, as holds true for computing generally (see Mahoney 2011). I won’t do it here because I don’t know how, but I will suggest some indications of its difficulty and its fascinations