This post was first published at ideasunderground.com on 24 May, 2009. I’ve reproduced it here partly because that blog no longer exists, partly because it’s a lazy-but-efficient way of offering an idea I’ve been mulling over for some time to a new audience, and partly because I’m (sadly, perhaps) still quite taken with it. It fits well with my belief that scholars – especially in a post Edward Snowden world – need to understand the engineered nature of the virtualmachines they use in their work (regardless of whether they want to build digital outputs or not). Achieving a robust level of scholarly self-consciousness in the digital age is a challenge that most people have (I suggest) given up on, in the face of technological advance rather than methodological choice or epistemological orientation. This has huge implications for the integrity of future scholarship, but opens up equally fascinating areas for research and analysis.
Digital Humanists as Master Builders
I’ve been thinking about the now relatively long-standing debate in Digital Humanities about ‘who’s in and who’s out’ and wondering if there’s an angle we haven’t been considering (by writing ‘we’ this makes an assumption I’m ‘in’, of course, which I have to admit feels both presumptive given there’s a chance I don’t fit someone else’s criteria and odd given I’m a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities). My suggestion is that we need to stop only thinking about the specific technical skills a digital humanist needs, and consider the function the (extra)discipline plays in the broader community, as well as the role(s) it is likely to need to play in the future.