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It's also been a crystalizing, bracing opportunity to think about what, exactly digital humanities means for me, and why I am doing the work I am. I spent part of my day fruitlessly defining and defending on Facebook my own sense of this work to a medievalist acquaintance who wrote to me a litany of protests like "‎I think this mapping stuff (turning text into data and into an image) is, well, pretty much without consequence, personally."

Newspaper articles are designed to tell you difficult things easily, and by their nature misquote you, even when they print word-for-word a sentence you actually said. The Times article is a fine attempt to talk about some of the work being done in the so-called Humanities 2.0, but such pieces inevitably flatten much of what is exciting here, at least to me. What I didn't realize, though, was how reporting about some humanities scholars’ desire to focus on digital modes of data and visualization of information would unintentionally catalyze cries of reductionism and the de-humani(ties)zation of our disciplines. The nearly one hundred comments to the article (I know - why did I read them?) are dominated by harsh runs of posts rejecting the significance and relevance of data in the humanities, and at times the humanities in general (though there was an edifying, late rally of support for such work before comments closed at the end of the day). But at least only one particularly frustrated reader went as far to call the academics profiled in the piece "pseudo-scholars" (I’m looking at you, #43, Thomas Clarke, from Phoenix Ariz.).

I am deeply grateful for such sentiments; they remind me of the necessity of living beyond the work you do, and what you think it does, and your like-minded peers - beyond the "horizontal modeling" of your intellect (a phrase itself is stolen un-horizontally from an English professor whose arguments I find profoundly misguided: Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation). I thought I'd take a little space here to work out in a little more (if still brief and woefully unspecific) detail what this kind of work means to me, and why I find it important. Most of my own early work in applying digital technologies to medieval studies was of a remediating sort - in the 1990's, while designing the now, already, antique Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition, I hadn't yet worked out that technology didn't allow you to do things better, faster, stronger (a.k.a. the Bionic Man hermeneutic), but instead differently. Around that time, I was at a series of Kalamazoo sessions on digital resources for medieval studies (at the time, mostly new web sites or giant, funded catalogue and/or database initiatives) and Dan O'Donnell (soon to become the founder of Digital Medievalist) asked a question that has haunted me ever since. During the q&a, Dan said something like, "Well, okay, is all this just improving what we already do, or is actually changing what we do?" Sitting there, I was appalled - not at the question, but at the answer I myself had - which was "no, not really."

Where, exactly, was the brave new world?

Writing Virtually Anglo-Saxon was, in part, my attempt to work out theoretically some of the possible valencies of new media for medieval study. But it wasn't until about five years later that the a-ha moment came for me regarding digital praxis in medieval studies. At a 2003 conference about "New Technologies and Old Texts”, I saw a presentation by the HUMI Project, based at Keio University. The Japanese have a knack for bringing it in ways you do not expect. Like Pocky (seriously, have you seen the design aesthetic here?). HUMI was at the time analyzing the typographic output of Caxton's printing house, and computer generating histograms of individual printed letter characters from different books. They were doing this in part to trace evidence of decay of the typeset being used across Caxton's print runs. In effect, though, they were also rebuilding from printed words on the page a granular history of the objects which produced them. This is where the penny dropped, as I realized that computers had the ability to read those words differently than we instinctively could or would -- a reverse engineering of what I later learned was transcoding, or the ability of new media to read machine code, but simultaneously reformulate it into forms of signification readable by human users. For the computer, the word on the page encoded far more than we could physically see, calculate, or unaided understand.

"Calculate" is the key word here. The brain needs help to do its scholarly work. We've had technology assisting us for longer than we care to remember - indeed, we've forgotten, interiorized, as Ong puts it, the technology; we’ve embedded the glasses, the pen, the book, and gradually now the computer deep within us - becoming unwitting cyborgs in the process. A number of reader comments in the Times piece took pains to differentiate between the tools and the transformational rhetoric the article espoused, saying, in summary, They're just tools - they don't do anything - the scholar still needs to interpret the data, or, as Anthony Grafton states in the article, “It’s easy to forget the digital media are means and not ends." Sure, fine, yep. But since when haven't tools transformed the human? The old-school cybernetic turn that tools are the extensions of "man" was outmoded at the moment that Norbert Wiener (n.b. best computer geek name ever) began to formulate it in the late 1940's, even by his own admission. The point of tools and humans is not that they augment the human, or technologically determine the human, but rather the constant feedback loop existing between the tool and the human - a kind of cultural technetics of a circulating, hybridized, slow dance of mutual prosthesis. In digital scholarship, we are beginning to generate data that we before did not have the capacity to imagine, both in quantity (the economies of scale are already becoming staggering), but in quality as well. So what happens, to give one emergent example from our own work in Digital Mappaemundi, when we can analyze the coordinate-coded proximity of related images, inscriptions and topographical features across a wide corpus of medieval maps and geographic texts? We can’t wait to find out, so we’re building the tools to do so, but it’s going to be a slow process of discovery.

This is the necessary symbiosis between flesh and machine. One thing I've learned this semester while team-teaching an undergraduate digital humanities class with my computer-scientist collaborator Shannon Bradshaw, is that computers are great at things that humans are not, and vice-versa. Our mental ability to calculate complex equations is rudimentary at best - a dollar-store calculator outperforms us. But relatively speaking, computing technology is still ghastly when it comes to such things as linguistic facility, or recognizing "image affect" - the capacity of visuals to generate emotion. Fascinating. Numbers, words and pictures - these are what drive our hyperreal world after all, and our interpretation of it; we need machines to produce them, and machines to understand them. One manifest utility of digital technology is that it forces us to admit how porous the boundaries are between such signifying ingredients. We're already quite accomplished at turning everything about our world into words - we've had centuries of scholarly practice - but what happens when we turn words back into objects, or into images, or turn images into numbers?

There's much more that could be discussed, of course - especially the communal and collaborative qualities of new media discourse that are also ardently post-human, but I’ve written enough, and I think Asa’s going to hit this aspect a bit. (Oh, okay - one quick anecdote: I've taught Foucault's "What is an Author?" in my Intro to Lit Crit class for the better part of two decades now. This year was the first year where I actually felt the author function re-historicizing in modes analogous to medieval corporate production, as students brought up Wikipedia and other digital texts as examples of authoritative, yet authorless discourse. It was pretty nifty).

The work being done by the scholars mentioned in the Times article, and the intense industry of the other “geek/poets” that we there stand in for as convenient body doubles, is not revolutionary, but revelatory. The article is not, as some have (mis)taken it, meant to indicate that now is the time when the new, exciting digital work is being done (it has been for decades), or that now is the time that changes the game. Change is always. The article is simply a signpost along the way of a slow, inexorable tipping point of the grinding shift to that which comes next. Anglo-Saxon England didn't end in 1066, despite all the tumult and arguably sudden upsets to the ruling structure. Gradually, later, it just was no longer, well, really what it was before, and had become something different. Mostly. Welcome to the humanities. . . again.

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