In both courses and conversations, I’ve started to explore the digital humanities field and what it means for scholarship and education. Although there are examples of using digital technology to process texts for scholarship dating back several decades (the first known case was in 1949 – using an IBM machine to support religious research being undertaken by an Italian Jesuit, Father Busa), the Web offers more. For example, there is the Internet Shakespeare Editions project based at the University of Victoria. Among other things, it makes it easy to compare texts and seek out differences. The project combines powerful digital interfaces with access to The Illuminated Text. The tension between these two modes of accessing these texts are a useful tension. One can both see texts as they were made (or get close to that process) and manipulate them digitally. Offering multiple means of using such resources is part of the promise of digital humanities. If you’re interested in a general introduction to the field, I recommend (free!) Blackwell’s book, A Companion to the Digital Humanities.
When I first started to learn about digital humanities, it looked like it was largely dominated by English scholars and the occasional computer scientists. In fact, there are many more working in the field, including librarians who are exploring it such as the Chief Librarian of McMaster University and the Chief Librarian at the University of Toronto Mississauga. This is a good trend that needs more encouragement. In addition to connecting users with existing information resources, this is another kind of work I would like to work on – participating in the creation of new tools and supporting the development of new types of scholarship and learning. Just as humanities scholarship is moving beyond using books and print alone, libraries need to make that move as well. It looks like there is much potential to do innovative work in this field. I do wonder about the longevity of some projects which are often funded by short term grants. Libraries and archives may have a role to play here in providing institutional support (along with R&D) to keep these projects online and evolving.
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