[day one continued]

On to John Unsworth’s keynote, then. It was titled “Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation.” He spoke of the ways in which we value and attend to works of art, which segued into a discussion of how (and why) forms of attention in humanities computing change over time.

Most of the talk was about tools. Unsworth whizzed us through a fast and thorough history of humanities computing tools, starting with old gems like TUSTEP and mentioning also TACT. These are useful for gathering quantifiable data; but, Unsworth said, statistical methods have had a “limited vogue,” not because the tools aren’t there, but because up until lately, the available tools did not answer the questions that are most interesting to humanists. Such as: what don’t we know?

Humanities aren’t about problem solving, he said, but about appreciation. There are tools, and then there are texts as tools (like dictionaries). Archives are also tools, and here we heard of those sprouted by IATH, in particular the Rossetti Archive and the Blake Archive. (Unsworth did not fail to remark that none of these archives have a long-term plan for preservation; I wonder if computing humanists are using “Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature” in their work?)

These and other archives are fascinating projects that, among other things, model their subject matter. Modeling projects, Unsworth said, strives to show us not so much what’s there as what is no longer there; and there is a difficult problem inherent in distinguishing what you do and do not know for sure.

So he proposes that visualization is the Next Step in humanities computing. This proposal reiterates what has been proposed by others before, but contextualizes it perfectly. Unsworth’s talk showed a nicely presented, logical evolution of the field. Now that we’ve got a healthy amount of theory down, complete with as-yet unrealized Exciting Ideas and the beginnings of technology that will help us realize them, it’s time to focus on aesthetics. Visualization, then, seems a natural next point of focus. It’s no wonder that humanists don’t like the word “tool”: it carries implicit baggage of heavy, repetitive tedium. Wouldn’t it be nice someday, Unsworth asked us, instead of telling our colleagues “this is a tool for text mining,” to be able to propose to them: “would you like to play a game of text exploration?”

(Ivanhoe comes to mind again. Please oh please, someone, make this excitement public already…)

The audience chuckled appreciatively. Yes, we all want to play.

I confess, the afternoon sessions took place towards the end of a very long and saturated day. This batch was more presentation of specific projects than general theory; instead of trying to summarize them all here, I’ll cheat and point you to the five abstracts available online for your perusal.