Abstract
A 2008 article by Patrick Juola describes the digital humanities community as marginal to mainstream academic discussions and suggests that its work has little scholarly impact. At the same time, mainstream humanities scholars are using digital resources more and more, but these resources are chiefly produced by libraries and commercial organizations rather than digital humanities specialists. How can the digital humanities achieve its promise and transform humanities scholarship? It is suggested that the digital humanities community is too inward-looking and needs to reach out to wider constituencies. In particular, digital humanities specialists should urgently engage with the wider theoretical concerns that characterize humanities scholarship. Projects such as the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 engage new audiences because they are grounded in a strong research vision.
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There are of course exceptions to Juola’s rule: scholars such as Jerome McGann, Kevin Kiernan or Tim Hitchcock are among the leading scholars in their respective fields, and have, through projects such as the Rossetti Archive, Electronic Beowulf and Proceedings of the Old Bailey, been very influential in establishing the digital humanities. It is a commonplace of discussions about the digital humanities that young scholars suffer from a lack of job opportunities, with the American tenure process in particular creating pressure to publish conventional monographs and articles in peer-reviewed journals. A characteristic comment is that of Allison Muri of the University of Saskatchewan who at a recent conference at the University of Virginia emphasized the difficulties of presenting a complex multimedia project to a tenure committee. Muri commented that such a project might ‘make an innovative, important, sustained and usable contribution to scholarship, research, and teaching, but how will I, as principal investigator, present this work to the College Review Committee, which oversees tenure, promotion, and merit increases, in the first year? in the third year? in the tenth year?’ (Muri, 2010: 26). It is, however, facile to suggest, as did many of the contributors to the same conference in Virginia, that such difficulties are due to the attachment of a hide-bound academy to print publication and its failure to engage with technological change. Juola’s analysis suggests a less comforting conclusion, namely that the difficulties of establishing the digital humanities within the academy are due to its collective failure to produce scholarship of outstanding importance and significance. Journals such as Literary and Linguistic Computing are not read by mainstream scholars because they do not contain scholarship of importance to them. Many digital humanities journals are seen as house publications for a small group of technical specialists. The results are inevitable: ‘tenure-track opportunities for DH specialists are rare, publications are not widely read or valued, and, perhaps most seriously in the long run, the advances made are not used by mainstream scholars’ (Juola, 2008: 74).
At the Digital Humanities conference in 2010, in one of the most impassioned and compelling lectures ever given on the digital humanities, Melissa Terras urged the digital humanities community to redouble its efforts to establish the discipline: to emphasize the importance of the new digital tools which are available, to improve the digital identity of the subject, to seek to put in place better career structures for younger researchers, to enhance the impact of their work and engage with new audiences (Terras, 2011). Terras placed at the heart of her argument the Transcribe Bentham project, which seeks to use crowd sourcing techniques to help produce an edition of the papers of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Terras suggests that Transcribe Bentham will produce new audiences and new forms of engagement which will take the digital humanities onto a broader stage. Bentham is by no means one of the most attractive subjects for a project to enhance public engagement with humanities scholarship – it is difficult to think of Bentham without imagining the workhouses which were one of the results of his Utilitarian ideas. Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon, a prison or hospital in which the inmates could be secretly observed, is a chilling and unnerving idea which was used by Foucault as an image of the power structures of society. Nevertheless, Bentham is a major figure, and it is clearly valuable to make an edition of his papers available, but in Terras’s presentation there is no suggestion as to how Transcribe Bentham will change our understanding of Bentham or his ideas. Likewise, the website of Transcribe Bentham gives little sense as to how the project will advance scholarship beyond helping to create an eventual edition (whose exact nature is unclear); Transcribe Bentham in its web presentation appears as little more than an antiquarian homage to the founder of the university where the project is based.
In her lecture, Terras urged the subject associations of digital humanities, such as the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), to enhance their profile to support the development of an academic discipline. But an academic discipline is only as good or as significant as the scholarship it produces. The plethora of inward-looking subject organizations such as ALLC and ADHO risks increasing the marginalization of the digital humanities by engaging in internalized dialogue irrelevant to the mainstream of humanities scholarship. Unless projects like Transcribe Bentham are going to transform our views of major intellectual themes such as (for example) Bentham’s relationship to the emergence of modernity, they will always be irrelevant technological sideshows. Christine Borgman argued in a keynote presentation to the 2009 Digital Humanities conference that, in order for the digital humanities to achieve the impact of major scientific projects, it needs more investment in technical infrastructure and to move away from small uncoordinated projects (Borgman, 2009). But this misses the point that large-scale scientific projects develop because of the need to investigate major scholarly questions. It is reasonable to dream, as does the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, of a ‘big humanities’ (Schnapp and Presner, 2009), but a ‘big humanities’ will emerge only as a response not to technological possibilities but rather to large scholarly questions and big intellectual themes.
But there is a paradox here. While the digital humanities community struggles to achieve a wider scholarly impact, and appears fragmented and preoccupied by internal technical debates, humanities scholars are becoming more and more dependent on digital tools and resources. However, these resources are generally not emerging from the digital humanities community. A recent study by Mark Greengrass and Stephen Brown found that 89% of a sample of 149 humanities researchers used the Web on a daily basis and 77% had been using the Web for five years or more (Greengrass and Brown, 2010). Focus groups drawn from this sample stated that the three advantages of using online methods of research were that they enhanced the speed and efficiency of research, enabled more timely access to scholarly information and also suggested new ways of working. Likewise in the LAIRAH study (Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities), 81% of a sample of humanities researchers identified themselves as extensive users of digital resources, and 83% of the sample agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that digital resources had changed the way that they did their research. It is therefore difficult to accept the claim of commentators such as Christine Borgman (2009) and Kenneth Hamma (2009) that humanities scholars are professionally indisposed to accept change or reluctant to engage with technology. Reliance on digital methods and resources has permeated almost every aspect of humanities scholarship, and the transformation has arguably been more dramatic than in the sciences, since humanities scholars previously had little technical engagement. For those involved with the digital humanities, the problem is that the contribution of the digital humanities community to these changes has been piecemeal and fragmentary. The log analysis by the LAIRAH project pointed out that the vast majority of resources used by humanities scholars were generic resources created by libraries and commercial publishers, such as JSTOR, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or Literature Online (Warwick et al., 2008). Much less use was made of the specialist niche resources developed by the digital humanities community. Humanities scholars have engaged with the digital environment, deeply, profoundly and enthusiastically, but not with the digital humanities or the tools developed by the digital humanities community. For most humanities scholars, the most pressing need is to secure access to commercial library resources such as Gale’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online and their chief concern is to ensure that these resources perform more effectively.
Humanities scholarship has already become digital in many ways. Humanities scholars are now utterly dependent on many different digital tools and resources. This is an irrevocable shift; as Jerome McGann has recently commented, although some humanities scholars might cherish the reliability and certainty of print-based research and publication, ‘one might as well hope for the return of the unity of Christendom, a global economy of sailing ships, or the Holy Roman Empire’ (2010b: 8). McGann forcefully argues that the most pressing issue is rather that the scholarly community has played little part in shaping this humanities digital environment. The key elements of the new scholarly ecosystem have been developed by libraries and commercial organizations: electronic journals and journal repositories such as JSTOR and Project Muse; packages of digitized materials ranging from Scriptorium, which presents the important manuscript holdings of the Parker Library in Cambridge, to Gale’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, which are available only on a subscription basis and are often beyond the means of many university libraries; the digital repositories maintained by university libraries; and, above all, huge commercial projects such as Google Books and Google Scholar. The powerlessness of the scholarly community is particularly apparent in the case of Google Books, and concerns about the implications of seeing so much of the cultural record effectively appropriated by a single large corporation have been the driving force behind Robert Darnton’s recent calls for the creation of a National Public Library of America (Darnton, 2009a; 2009b; 2010a; 2010b). The limited scholarly involvement with the creation of digital resources can also be seen, however, in more specialized resources such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). The creation of the English Short Title Catalogue recording all books printed in the English-speaking world up to 1800 has been one of the great library enterprises of the post-war period. To make the microfilm images of these books available in an online form revolutionizes access to the early printed record and also assists in the preservation of fragile artefacts. However, since these databases were designed by libraries and commercial publishers largely to support remote and surrogate access, the searchability of the texts is limited. In the case of Early English Books Online, no searchable version of the text was provided; in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, the optical character recognition software struggles to provide comprehensive results from the hand-printed books. For Early English Books Online, the Text Creation Partnership is now creating Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)-compliant texts of the books in the resource. For Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, 18th Connect, directed by Laura Mandell (2010: 48–51), is likewise seeking to improve the quality of the texts to facilitate more comprehensive searching.
There can be no more striking statement of the impotence of the scholar in the creation of these fundamental resources than this messy post hoc process of creating usable texts for EEBO and ECCO. The work of the Text Creation Partnership and 18th Connect is valuable and important, but making these resources fit for scholarly use after their publication is hardly a sensible way of proceeding. In this failure, the digital humanities must take a considerable amount of the blame. As Jerome McGann notes, the Digital Humanities conference sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations is dominated by weary discussion of dry questions about applications, metadata, tools, platforms and information architecture. How scholars work online is barely considered. Again, McGann strikes the nail right on its head: ‘our work needs to move outside the tight little island populated by digital humanists – tight little disciplinary islands; tight little techie islands; tight little islands of higher education. Out to what John Unsworth calls “constituencies”. If sustainability is a problem for online humanities projects, “constituencies” are a key to its solution’ (McGann, 2010a: 2). In developing these links, there is one fundamental point which digital humanities specialists have been reluctant to accept, namely that they must give up their dearly held belief that humanities scholars are generally resistant to online scholarship and that those working in the digital humanities are in some way damaging their careers by developing new ways of working. This may have been the case 20 years ago, but it is certainly not so now. Like everyone else, humanities scholars are feeling their way towards how they work in this online world and are uncertain how professional parameters will be reshaped, but the vast majority of humanities scholars engage in a form of online scholarship. The greatest danger is that humanities scholars will develop the same consumer relationship to digital content that they have had to print. In 1998, I observed that the promise of digital technology lies not just in replicating artefacts as we know them, but in allowing new combinations and disclosures not heretofore available: ‘There is a terrible risk that as digital libraries enter a phase of commercial developments this will be lost sight of. The only way of ensuring that this kind of research-oriented approach continues and develops is to maintain and build on the close co-operation between scholar, curator, conservator, photographer and technical expert’ (Prescott, 1998: 49). One glance at Google Books, or Eighteenth-Century Collections Online or Gale’s British Library Newspapers suggests that we have lost sight of the need for this sort of collaboration and linkage, and that somehow – if we have not missed the boat as the commercialization of this environment proceeds apace – we need to rebuild this kind of connection between scholars, librarians, publisher and programmer.
The digital humanities community should have been the key group in promoting such links but, distracted by the pressures of creating its own small-scale, low-impact niche projects, and too often preoccupied with preserving the theological purity of TEI and debating how many angels may dance on an angle bracket, those engaged in the digital humanities have failed miserably in pursuing such truly collaborative visions. While the digital humanities were seeking to show how TEI could be applied to Middle Eastern epigraphy, Google Books was born. Is this the shape of things to come? Digital humanities specialists creating niche products which attempt to breathe life into obscure scholarly subject areas with tiny audiences, while the bulk of humanities scholars rely on commercial packages for their online scholarship? Even if this is the end result, it is surely nevertheless worth struggling for the nobler vision expressed by Jerome McGann:
Human memory – the Mother of the Muses – is the business of the humanist. The scholar works to preserve for the future an intimate connection between what Wordsworth called ‘the noble living and the noble dead’. As with the renaissance sped forward by the printing revolution of the fifteenth century, digital technology is driving a radical shift in humanities scholarship and education. The depth and character of the change can be measured by one simple but profound fact: the entirety of our cultural inheritance will have to be reorganized and re-edited within a digital horizon. (McGann, 2010a: 1)
In contributing to this reorganization of the cultural heritage, identifying the most important ‘constituencies’ is the first task of the digital humanist. Clearly, it is urgent to undertake further studies of current and changing patterns of use following from those undertaken by Mark Greengrass and Stephen Brown or by the LAIRAH project. But certain priorities in building new constituencies are nevertheless already evident. The first is a need for the digital humanities urgently to reconnect with the scholarly agendas of the wider humanities community. It could be argued that a preoccupation with developing and promoting certain formal methodologies, most notably TEI, has been counterproductive in that they have created a barrier between digital humanities specialists and the wider humanities audience. A recent New York Times article on ‘Humanities 2.0’ suggested that this is about to change and that digital humanities would offer a way forward to a field which had become bogged down in theory: ‘Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have’ (Cohen, 2010). However, the truth may actually be the other way round – that the perceived dichotomy between computing and theory has contributed to the marginalization of digital humanities and explains its apparent neglect. It has long been recognized that one difficulty with the digital humanities has been that its emphasis on empirical quantitative techniques and its assumption that the edition is at the heart of much scholarly activity in the humanities ran directly counter to the major theoretical shifts in the humanities since 1960. Indeed, it is difficult to stifle a suspicion that, for many digital humanities specialists, the attraction of the computer was that it provided a refuge from theory.
While Terry Eagleton (2003) has recently proclaimed the Death of Theory, he nevertheless insists that ‘the golden age of cultural theory’ has fundamentally changed the way in which the humanities are studied. ‘There can be no going back to an age when it was enough to pronounce Keats delectable or Milton a doughty spirit. It is not as though the whole project was a ghastly mistake on which some merciful soul has now blown the whistle, so that we can all return to whatever it was we were doing before Ferdinand de Saussure heaved over the horizon. If theory means a reasonably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensible as ever’ (Eagleton, 2003: 1). Eagleton points out that cultural theory has introduced many fundamental new themes in the study of the humanities, such as the study of gender and sexuality, identity, media or public space. Cultural theory has established that popular culture is worth studying, and has brought back into full view a great deal which the post-industrial construct of culture had assigned to the margins. These are now the great overarching and connecting themes in the study of the humanities, and the digital exploration of culture provides a rich way of consolidating and extending our engagement with these themes. One of the great boons of packages like ECCO and EEBO is the way in which they make literature which has been assigned to the margins more available. Genealogical databases like Ancestry or Findmypast (often excluded from the canon of online scholarly resources) facilitate the recovery of obscure, humble and forgotten lives. Yet those working in formal digital humanities centres have engaged with these major themes only in a very limited and tentative fashion. The potential is apparent from some long-standing projects such as the Women Writers Project at Brown University, but it is striking that in its presentation this project stresses text encoding as much as – perhaps even more than – the recovery of lost women’s literature. A search of the Digital Humanities Quarterly (which now runs to five volumes) for the word ‘gender’ produces only 19 hits, and apparently only one article specifically concerned with the study of gender. Likewise, a search for the term ‘public sphere’ produces only eight hits, although public sphere theory provides a very rich context for interpreting the new digital environment. Heidegger, Foucault and Raymond Williams, nowadays key scholarly names in the humanities with a great deal to say about technology and cultural forms, have each only been cited once in all the articles in Digital Humanities Quarterly (with Heidegger and Williams both cited in the same article). This is evidently a humanities periodical seriously out of touch with the modern study of the humanities.
Eagleton’s proclamation of the death of theory might be taken as providing comfort for those who would rather that the computer should be a refuge against the latest -ism, but part of Eagleton’s criticism of cultural theory has been its failure to engage with the kinaesthetic experience – with the fact of living in a body and being certain of one’s own mortality. And this question of the nature of reality, of the way in which we engage with digital representations of cultural artefacts designed to be held, touched and used, such as books and manuscripts, is, as Elaine Treharne (forthcoming) has pointed out, one of the fundamental issues posed by the use of digital resources such as Scriptorium. And here, of course, cultural theorists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (never cited in Digital Humanities Quarterly and only mentioned four times in passing in Literary and Linguistic Computing) have a great deal to say which should be at the heart of the intellectual agenda of the digital humanities. In rebuilding links with the constituency of humanities scholars, the digital humanities community first needs urgently to re-engage with the humanities by exploring the debates around the thought of key thinkers such as Raymond Williams and Merleau-Ponty, whose names are at the moment absent from the digital humanities literature. Re-engaging with these more current intellectual debates will immediately open up new audiences for the digital humanities and engage new constituencies. HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is characterized by a stronger teaching engagement than many digital humanities initiatives and also by its interest in new intellectual themes in the humanities as opposed to the formalistic techniques associated with older forms of the digital humanities. As a result of these interests, it attracts widespread support from the kind of younger scholars who, it has been assumed for many years, would become the flag bearers of the digital humanities, but who have all too often failed to appear. A recent blog post by Cathy Davidson of HASTAC reads as follows:
Let’s turn the lens on what has happened over the last three years with the HASTAC Scholars. And I’ll throw out a number here too: 350,000. That is how many unique visitors have stopped by the ten HASTAC Scholars Forums since September of 2009. A typical Forum receives 100–150 quite substantive comments, in some cases enough to make a persuasive and provocative book on the subject, and over 1040 comments total (deeply intellectual, engaged, generous, tough, funny comments). Topics so far have included Critical Code Studies, Democratizing Knowledge, Grading 2.0: Evaluation in a Digital Age, and Race, Ethnicity, and Diaspora in a Digital Age and the single busiest of all the Forums so far, ‘Queer and Feminist New Spaces’. (Davidson, 2011)
HASTAC is fully engaged with current themes in humanities research. It addresses contemporary as well as historical subjects whereas many of the older digital humanities vehicles seem nervous about venturing later than 1800. The result is that it has been very successful in connecting with wider humanities scholarship and in particular attracting a constituency of younger scholars. There are many lessons to be learnt here. The way in which engagement with current research themes builds new audiences is demonstrated in a different way by the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913. At one level, Proceedings of the Old Bailey is simply a fully searchable edition of a vast corpus of nearly 200,000 reports of criminal trials at London’s central criminal court. The printed proceedings are difficult to access and the large quantity of text is difficult to digest for further analysis without the aid of a computer. As such, the online resource is extremely valuable to the historian of crime and the legal system. But the directors of the project, Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker and Clive Emsley, also stress the way in which the project represents the largest single body of texts about the everyday lives of non-elite people in Britain ever published. The project thus seeks to assist in shifting the attention of historians towards the humble and the everyday. The project sheds great light on the condition of black communities in London in the eighteenth century. It provides information on gay and lesbian subcultures. It is one of the few available sources which gives information on the life of disabled people in early modern London. In short, while the Proceedings of the Old Bailey has its roots as a large-scale electronic edition, it goes on to make a substantial contribution to the articulation of new themes in social history.
By engaging with these new themes, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey not only opens new themes for scholarly research but also reaches new audiences. The large number of ordinary people recorded in the reports of the trials make them an extremely valuable resource for genealogical research; the details of transportations mean that it is a standard site for Australian family history. The website has received over 5 million hits since 2003. A recent report by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) shows the diversity of the audience for the website (Howard et al., 2010): 39% of users were engaged in academic (postdoctoral) research, and 36% in family history research; 28% simply explored the website because it was fun, and used it as a personal learning/leisure activity; another 28% were using the site to support university teaching. Its use in school teaching appears to be more limited, with just 3.6% of users in the JISC study using the site for school-level educational purposes. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey triumphantly shows how a powerful research vision, connected with current themes in mainstream humanities scholarship, can create digital activities which reach out not only to humanities scholars in many disciplines but also to new audiences outside the academy. It shows how good scholarship and effective engagement with audiences continue to go hand in hand in a digital environment.
The lesson of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey is that a profound grounding in current scholarship (which, as Ernest Boyer has reminded us, should encompass both learning and research) will both ensure an appeal to a scholarly audience and reach new audiences. It is this fundamental truth that the digital humanities community should strive to articulate within the new online world. It is this perspective that practitioners of the digital humanities need to bring to discussions with the libraries and commercial publishers who are responsible for creating the bulk of the online resources that scholars will use. The creators of digital content such as libraries operate in funding and strategic environments different to those of universities. As a result, they may have different priorities to academic users. Libraries and museums, for example, are frequently under pressure to give priority to an access agenda and to use digital techniques to widen audiences for material in their collections. The digital humanities community should be pivotal in developing a dialogue between libraries, museums, archives, publishers, scholars and educators, but it has been singularly unsuccessful in doing so. In retreating behind the bastions of formalistic practice, the digital humanities have ceased to be engaged with libraries and publishers at a strategic level, and these dialogues urgently need rebuilding. Such dialogues can only be re-established by convincing such potential partners in libraries and publishing that the result will be products that appeal more directly to a wider group of scholars. Dry arguments about metadata, open source, interoperability, digital ontologies or the future of the Web will have little traction here. Arguments about what scholars are currently interested in, and how digital humanities can transform intellectual agendas in the humanities, are much more pertinent in developing links with the key partners in creating digital resources.
In reading Patrick Juola’s description of the way in which the digital humanities has been still-born as an academic discipline, the inevitable comparison that comes to mind is with such fields as cultural and media studies which in Britain date from the early 1960s but are now firmly established as popular and influential academic disciplines in many universities. Why has digital humanities not achieved a similar success? The initial achievements of cultural studies in Britain reflected the influence of great works of scholarship by figures such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall – works which appealed to both scholarly and popular audiences. We lack any scholarship of a similar stature associated with the digital humanities – the work of scholars like McGann and Landow has been influential but tends to remain rooted in literary criticism rather than branching out into new fields in the way that the work of (say) Hoggart did. This is perhaps not surprising since the focus of much digital humanities work has been on the creation of online projects anchored in conventional subjects. Yet there is ample possibility for rich reflective commentary on the ways in which digital technologies are affecting our engagement with the cultural record, as the work of Jerome McGann among others clearly illustrates. This is another area where digital humanists have something to learn from new media studies, as a blog entry by Geoffrey Rockwell cited by Patrick Svensson indicates: ‘Digital theory should not be left to new media scholars, nor should we expect to get it right so that we can go back to encoding or other humanities disciplines. Theorizing, not a theory, is needed; we need to cultivate reflection, interruption, standing aside and thinking about the digital. We don’t need to negotiate a canon or a grand theory, instead I wish for thinking about and through the digital in community’ (Rockwell, 2004; Svensson, 2009). Glib comparisons with manuscript and print cultures are a feature of new media studies, and this is surely one area where humanities scholars are well placed to help develop a more nuanced view.
Some recent publications by scholars from North America such as Alan Liu (2004), Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008) and Allison Muri (2007) engage in a new and intellectually distinctive fashion with the digital refashioning of cultural memory. The work of these scholars brings to bear on the new digital environment that reflective, historical and critical approach which is at the heart of the humanities. Muri, for example, explores the way in which Enlightenment ideas of the relationship between the body and technology anticipate and permeate modern conceptions of the nature and potential of new technologies. By historicizing anxieties about the relationship between technology and the human mind, Muri counters many of the concerns of commentators such as Baudrillard about the explosion of information and communication. She emphasizes how, just as the book is a human artefact made to be touched, handled and explored, so the electronic text is also a sensual material object, of a very different kind to the book, but a human artefact nonetheless. Likewise, Kirschenbaum in a study which won the Modern Language Association’s First Book Prize in 2010 emphasizes the materiality of the digital. Kirschenbaum rejects the idea that digital information is in some way a vital force with no material content and reminds us of the materiality of the act of digital inscription, most strikingly in the case of the hard disk that receives the digital inscription but also in the many other textual practices which permeate the digital world:
… everything from labelling a diskette, which situates electronic textuality amid other technologies and practices of writing (indexing and cataloguing, longhand, adhesives, the felt-tip pens), to the contours of the keyboard and mouse that make their bodily marks felt in the ongoing pandemic of repetitive strain and white collar work injuries, to the growing crisis of e-waste (the unsafe disposal and sweat shop recycling, often at third world dumping sites, of hazardous but industrially precious components inherent to computing machinery). (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 10–11)
Kirschenbaum emphasizes in this context the important contribution which can be made by other forms of the study of text technologies, such as bibliography, palaeography and textual criticism. He observes that ‘given the origins of these methods in the study of paper and parchment, such an approach may seem odd or obscure. But in fact, textual studies should be recognized as among the sophisticated branches of media studies we have evolved’ (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 16). This connection with such disciplines as bibliography and museology is also seen as vitally important by the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, which declares that the mission of the digital humanities ‘recasts