Looking through an unknown,remembered gate: interdisciplinary meditations on humanities computing

Humanities computing is an ‘interdiscipline’ concerned with the application of computing to the arts and letters. Although it has been practised since the late 1940s, it has only recently begun to gain institutional recognition and a measure of self-awareness. In this contribution to the vigorous debate among practitioners, I argue for a common methodological ground shared by computer using scholars and students across the disciplines of the humanities. In large part because of the commons, these individuals tend to come together physically in laboratory settings as well as virtually online, pursuing traditional research goals by the means they now share, or collaborating on numerous larger projects that computing has enabled. A useful model of their collaboration is Peter Galison's ‘trading zone’, an anthropological–linguistic metaphor he uses to describe interchange among researchers and technicians of the Manhattan Project. Humanities computing functions like a merchant trader in a Galisonian trading zone: it sees to a similar interchange of tools and techniques among the departmentalised cultures with which it deals, and for itself studies the effects and consequences. It thus exemplifies a true interdisciplinarity. Sufficient work has now been done for us to begin to map out a research agenda for humanitites computing as an interdiscipline, and this will help to identify the essential habits of mind and skills our colleagues and students must have to refurbish the humanities in the twenty-first century. Computing presents the humanities with the need and opportunity to reconceptualise and rebuild our inherited scholarly forms, which are as historically contingent as any human artefact. Rethinking how we do what we do in turn requires what Clifford Geertz has called ‘intellectual weed control’. A central project of humanities computing is to help in the construction of a worldwide digital library of resources and tools. Its role within this project is, I argue, primarily to articulate the powers of imagination that computing in the humanities demands of us.