Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

Computing and digitisation are transforming not only the conditions of work for humanists, but also the ways in which humanists think and their disciplines are configured. The digital world both enables and compels new ways of thinking. And, significantly, it is just as transformative of teaching as it is of scholarship. Indeed, the most interesting thing about the new digital humanities environment may be that the distinction between teaching and scholarship is itself being eroded. The database is fast becoming the principal site of work in the humanities.

The first electronic digital computers were variations on the protean design of a limited Turing machine, which described not a single device but a schema, and which could assume many forms and could develop in many directions. It became what various groups of people made of it. The computer thus has little or no history of its own. Rather, it has histories derived from the histories of the groups of practitioners who saw in it, or in some yet to be envisioned form of it, the potential to realise their agendas and aspirations. What kinds of computers we have designed since 1945, and what kinds of programs we have written for them, reflect not so much the nature of the computer as the purposes and aspirations of the communities who guided those designs and wrote those programs. Their work reflects not the history of the computer but the histories of those groups, even as the use of computers in many cases fundamentally redirected the course of those histories. Separating the histories of computing, or perhaps even of computings, shifts attention to the major communities, or bodies of shared disciplinary practices, who embraced the new device and helped to shape it by adapting it to their needs and aspirations.

The paper concerns the closely related topics of the possibility of machines having identifiable personalities, and the possible future legal responsibilities of machines. As will become clear, I wish to explore these topics in terms which are basically those of computational linguistics; and by ‘machines’ here, I intend software entities, rather than robots, and in particular the sort of software agents now being encountered on the web, ranging at present from technical advisers to mere chatbots. I call them Companions. The body of the paper explores the following related aspects of a Companion in more detail: what kind and level of personality should be in a machine agent so as to be acceptable to a human user, more particularly to one who may fear technology and have no experience of it; and what levels of responsibility and legal attribution for responsibility can we expect or desire from entities like web agents in the near future?

Current intellectual wisdom, abetted by philosophers of all stripes, teaches that the Cartesian philosophy is both wrong and dead. This wisdom will be overtaken by events. Present and future technologies – ranging from organ transplants to information coding – will increasingly make us revert to Descartes's picture of two absolutely distinct types of domains, the mental and the physical, which nevertheless constantly interact. We as humans are constituted in both domains, and also must inhabit them. This is less a matter of facts – for what a person is, is never simply a matter of fact – than of how we will come to conceive of ourselves in the light of the facts that will press in upon us.

Global developments enhanced by digital technology and the accompanying transfer from analogue to digital media and communication systems have enhanced the dialogue between activists for world peace and new media artists. At stake is an extensive transfer of media information from playful self-representations on the home video camera to widely circulating communications data stores being matched against both realistic and imagined terror databases. In all sectors of private and public life we are experiencing a troubling transfer of human rights into digital databanks as the unchecked technological response to global terror. Under suspicion and in-secure, we find ourselves suspended in-between the conditions of ‘digital terror’ itself. This essay focuses attention on the paradox of digital terror as it is situated in the in-betweenness of the network and its artistic interventions. By introducing a number of recent digital installations from across the digital divide, it makes evident the multiple levels of transfer at stake in the parodic artistic translation of the inbetween, the artistic blending of digital divide and digital delirium. Moreover, the relation beween divide and delirium constitutes less of a dialectic and more of a transference, one always positioned between the social and the personal.

This paper addresses the so called ‘crisis in the humanities’ in the context of two of its most apparent symptoms: the digital transformation of our museums and archives, and the explicitly parallel ‘crisis in tenure and publishing’ that has more recently come to attention. It introduces and frames a practical proposal, now under way, for dealing with both. This is the NINES initiative – Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship. The rationale of NINES is described, including the initial set of digital tools now in active development. The general aim of NINES is to move the rethinking of literary and cultural studies, method as well as theory, by establishing an institutionalised mechanism (peer reviewed) for new kinds of digitally based analytic and interpretive practices.