This talk was given to the University of Canterbury History Department, New Zealand, March 14th, 2012. The talk aimed to introduce both the Digital Humanities, and a proposed new programme in Digital Humanities to colleagues in the College of Arts, School of Humanities. The paper is divided into three parts:
I’ve been watching the current Theory Debate via Digital Humanities Now this past week or so with interest but have only just found the time to write down my reaction to it. It’s a topic that has been dear to my heart for some time now. It touches on the question of where the digital humanities stand in relation to the core tradition, and what direction it’s going to take as a practice (I’m not sure I’m keen for it to become a ‘discipline’ in the traditional sense of the term). I’ve often said that if DH is to be taken seriously by the analog humanities it will need to begin to engage with some core humanities practices, develop some kind of theoretical framework(s), identify some core methodologies, and generally produce some writing that has recognizable intellectual ‘grunt’.
I’ve been taken by the final report of the Comité des Sages (‘the reflection group on bringing Europe’s cultural heritage online’) , The New Renaissance (January 2011). It articulates a moral imperative that has long been a driving force of the digital humanities but is infrequently surfaced, perhaps for good reason given the dangers of mixing intellectual and cultural movements with claims that they coincide with the morally correct.
A few comments (specifically from @jasonaboyd) about infrastructure at the recent Victoria THATCamp sparked an idea, and I’ve thrown together a site called Academic AMIs: Ready to Eat Digital Humanities Infrastructure. The idea is that, while Amazon Web Services might not be suitable for all (or even many) digital humanities projects, and the platform isn’t exactly user friendly to people uncomfortable with the command line, it does offer an extremely scalable cloud infrastructure and a nice way to package up web application stacks for distribution.
The Story of Linux, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. A video from the Linux Foundation.