Humanities Computing in an Age of Social Change

keynote / plenary
Authorship
  1. 1. Joe Raben

    Queens College - City University New York

Work text
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Humanities computing in the United States can be considered to have started a few years before 1964,
when IBM sponsored what it designated as a Literary Data Processing Conference. While most of the
participants in that early conference, despite their often-expressed interest in the concept of nonlinear
visualization of texts, were clearly oriented toward the goal of producing a printed book, two generations
after that founding conference, we can recognize that the value of their work lies in their having begun to
establish humanities computing as a valid occupation of scholars. There was, nevertheless, a need for a
common ground on which to record and exchange our ideas of where this new mode of scholarship was
leading us; hence the print journal Computers and the Humanities.
Not evident to that handful of pioneers in 1964 was the amazing growth of computer applications
throughout society that were made possible by the technological advances of the next half-century.
Humanities computing has advanced as far as it has almost exclusively because of the revolution on the
technological side. Because of the computer revolution, the world we inhabit is no more like the one
known to previous generations than that of the twentieth century resembled any of its predecessors.
The drastic changes in our world in the almost half-century since 1964 makes clear that we can no more
predict the changes to come than those pioneers did in their own time. Computer-based communication,
in particular and especially in its printed form, is being violently altered by the new technology. The
openness of the Internet and the Web being a manifestation of a democratic spirit, the burgeoning role
of computers in education, including humanities education, can only continue to disrupt the traditional
structure of academe.
The long-term consequences of the increasing cost of a postsecondary education and the increasing
availability of resources that exceed those of any university would seem to drive toward the replacement
of the bricks-and-mortar university by a totally online facility. That paradigm shift requires the
aggregation in a central online location of information about the growing resources of the digital
humanities. The generation that will prevail in the middle of the twenty-first century, wired to computers
for all their needs, social as well as intellectual, will look beyond our current concepts of humanities.
How well we prepare for that world, what foundation we construct to emphasize the positive potentials
of whatever technology will have evolved, will be the measure of how much we have learned from our
humanistic concern for our own history

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Conference Info

Complete

ADHO - 2010
"Cultural expression, old and new"

Hosted at King's College London

London, England, United Kingdom

July 7, 2010 - July 10, 2010

142 works by 295 authors indexed

XML available from https://github.com/elliewix/DHAnalysis (still needs to be added)

Conference website: http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/

Series: ADHO (5)

Organizers: ADHO

Tags
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  • Language: English
  • Topics: None