The world is slowly but surely recognizing that the revolution in computing and information technology has began to transform the humanities. Other fields in the liberal arts were more obviously changed by the digital revolution, mainly through the capacity of computing to deal with massive quantities of digital information. The humanist version of number crunching occurred early in the field of linguistics, producing an entirely new discipline of computational linguistics. But other approaches ranging from computer visualization to the creation of hugely complex databases have slowly changed the ways in which humanists think about significant problems, as well as the manner in which they analyze them.
Since universities, in which the bulk of humanistic scholarship takes place, devote a smaller and smaller proportion of research resources to the humanities, much of the promise of the digital humanities frontier has been underdeveloped. Humanists are last in line for new hardware and software, they have fewer technologists who specialize in their digital needs, the libraries they depend on are underfunded, and they have a less fully developed national digital infrastructure. As to this last point, I was encouraged by the appearance oc the ACLS cyberinfrastructure project a couple of years ago, but disappointed to find that nothing seems to have been done to implement the report after it appeared on the Web.
But I was encouraged by the recent National Endowment for the Humanities announcement that its “Digital Humanities Initiative” has now been institutionalized as the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. That sounds right, and if more significant resources emerge in forthcoming NEH budgets, this will be an important step in the right direction. Thanks to Chairman Bruce Cole for this. NEH is also considering the feasibility of a University of Virginia-based organization for digital scholarly editing, which is precisely the sort of infrastructural support the field needs.
But the primary inspiration for the digital humanities has, from the start, come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Under the program officer Don Waters, Mellon has provided both leadership and significant funding for a host of worthy projects and initiatives, not least of which have been its own initiatives, JSTOR and ARTSTOR. The most recent of their funded projects is Bamboo, an attempt by humanities technologists at Berkeley and Chicago to develop shared technology services for humanities research. Without Mellon, we simply would not have a field to worry about.
Much remains to be done, and campus-based inattention to the humanities complicates the task. But the digital humanities are here to stay, and they bear close watching.
