Last week I attended the Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities at the University of Virginia. It was a great time, and in many ways a rather unusual conference. For one, this humanist event was in part sponsored by the National Science Foundation (!!), thanks to the tireless work of Anita Jones and others. Most notably, it was more of a workshop than a conference environment. We were specifically asked to talk not so much about our own projects as about the state of the field and where we, as tool builders, would like to take it. I knew about half the people there from past contact, and was glad to meet so many new (to me) scholars all of whom had interesting things to say.

On Wednesday evening there was a welcoming reception and a keynote by Brian Cantwell Smith, a well-spoken computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Here are some fragmentary notes from his talk.

Digital is a trendy word, he said, second only to like on college campuses.

Descartes was a smart guy. He separated the work, or process, of understanding the world from the world thereby understood.

Around the turn of the 20th century, we discovered that we could fuse meaning and mechanism. An example of this would be us. This idea eventually gave birth to computers.

Computers aren’t anything special, and computer scientists aren’t studying anything special. Or maybe anything in particular. This is liberating: instead of a restricted domain, they have a sort of monopoly on the universe.

We (computing humanists) shouldn’t be party to propagating the dualism between the ostensible “abstract” and the concrete. A server going down loses not the representation of mail, but actual mail. (That is, as I understand it: email, web pages and other electronic artifacts have become so ubiquitous, and so central to everyday life, that we can no longer think of them as fakes, substitutes for physical things. They are just as real.)

Descartes said that we should have clear and distinct ideas. But this isn’t the way the world actually works.

Maybe the tools we build are digital at the level of the bits, but what matters about them is humanistic.

Computers are a historical moment (a long one, which started in the mid-1800s and is still going) in which we are getting past Descartes.

Matter is both a noun and a verb. Material comes from matter.

Computing is allowing us to get past the temporary, 300-year divorce between matter-noun and matter-verb.

Our commitment to what it means to be human shouldn’t be ideological (”if it’s human, it’s good”).

People can be special as in worthy of study and careful consideration, not special as in this is where inquiry stops because there’s nothing more to say.

…..

On Thursday and Friday, we talked. And talked, and talked. Instead of trying to edit my aphoristic scribblings to recap all of what we talked about, I’ll point you to Geoffrey Rockwell’s (and, in small part, my) comprehensive summit notes on the TADA wiki. (TADA is the Text Analysis Developers Alliance whose motto is, endearingly, Real Humanists Make Tools.)

The main thing I came away with is this. There are many people currently building digital tools for the humanities. The tools themselves may be differently specialized, but there are many similarities in what motivates us and what we hope the near future will bring. On our way out of the summit many of us put our names down on one or more of the six (?) major topics discussed at the summit. I hope the conversations, and collaboration, will continue.