I find myself having more difficulty with this assignment than I originally expected. This post may sound like a book-report in search of a point, but I think the usability of these sources is inherently informing of their content. If Humanities Computing is the act of putting the output of human creativity into a computer or other electronic device in order to save it for future generations, analyze its content, or cause it to be more easily and effectively accessed and utilized, then it is only successful to the extent that it fulfills these goals.
The readings seem to aim to provide a history of the field, and I actually expected Fraser’s “A Hypertextual History of Humanities Computing,” would be more like
the University of Michigan’s timeline for digital technologies and preservation: (this is a really great at-a-glance timeline for technology) but focusing on technologies applied to the humanities. While clearly not finished yet (it currently has an extremely fragmentary feel) this seems like an accessible mode to present this information. The fragmentary nature of the writing makes me wonder how complete the information itself is; are there significant gaps in the units that are up, or is it just waiting for a final read-over?
The mapping exercise (found
here), on the other hand, creates a visual overview of the many related fields touched on and influenced by Humanities computing. This visualization is necessarily cramped by the sheer amount of information it attempts to maintain. This is a system of visualization that would benefit greatly from the 3d technologies like those employed by the
The Visual Thesaurus, or even the color-dimensions of other modeling software.
I feel like an extensive reading of the ListServ would, eventually, also give an overview of the field, but it isn’t set up for that manner of information retrieval. Like any topical discussion among specialists, the ListServ is chock full of jargon which I’m sure professionals in the digital humanities field understand. Perhaps ironically, my experience in library science makes some of the posts perhaps more obscure than they would be otherwise – I feel like the terminology is just off enough that I’m missing something important while skimming through the archive. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an effective search method for the archive, and the ability to organize “by thread” is only marginally helpful. There’s something that looks like a word-search under ArchTracker Display, but I couldn’t get it to work. Some sort of tagging system would be ideal.
The field of Digital Humanities/ Humanities Computing is about stretching our mental model of humanities to encompass a wider range of display, access, and analysis models. We understand how to access these new forms by employing established mental models (of how to use/examine/analyze “humanities” objects. New technologies allow us to stretch these models by creating new analogies to other, established models (folders, surfing, journaling, forums, classified ads). I feel like the current repositories for digital humanities texts about digital humanities (Ur-Humanities texts?) are currently not living up to the full potential of the medium.
