Strictly speaking very little
on the map shown above is new: nearly everything existed and was known ten
years ago. As we have suggested, however, it is the activity of mapping itself,
in the form it has taken here, that is a fundamentally new direction in our
second order (or meta-) thinking about the field.
A decade ago we knew enough
to relate common techniques to the various disciplines: we first suspected,
then partly knew that humanities computing was concerned with a methodological
commons within which disciplinary boundaries did not apply. Indeed, about then
it became possible to draw a map relating abstractions of computing and basic
types of software to ordinary aspects of research in the humanities. At the
time imaging (except for OCR) was not important enough to put on the map, so
its addition is new. "Communications" then did not yet centrally imply the Web,
as it certainly does now.
Recent experience, say within the last 5 years, has increasingly
involved multi-technology/multi-media work on the basis of large-scale
resources, with pronounced multidisciplinary results and discovery of further
potentials. In effect networked resources have begun to manifest the ancient
model of the research library, in which singular and relatively unchanging
resources are separated from their manifold and highly changeable uses,
allowing for indefinite recontextualization across the many fields of study to
which each resource is relevant. The emergence of this multidisciplinary
digital library has served not to fragment the methodological commons but to
emphasize its centrality and extend its breadth. In turn the centrality and
breadth of the commons have made it increasingly clear that in applying the
technologies we are in fact drawing on those "clouds of knowing", whose
methodological import we need to explore much more systematically.
The map illustrates the fundamental role of humanities computing as
agent of the commons, mediating through the shared techniques between the
clouds of knowing and specific research projects in the humanities. Among other
things, this mediation fosters the engagement of the clouds of knowing in the humanities research enterprise.
The future directions for humanities computing therefore involve
systematic exploration of the methodological commons to ensure that
developments are coherent, cohesive and responsible to its cultural
inheritance.Ý What is new is the
holistic overview of the commons and the future research agendas that it
graphically indicates.