Introduction

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This book collects the twenty-seven papers that organized a three-day conference at University of Virginia, Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come (26-28 March 2010). As the title suggests, the conference was not about “Digital Humanities” but “Online Scholarship”—a very different thing. Questions about applications, metadata, tools, platforms, and information architecture dominate the distinguished and long-running Digital Humanities conferences sponsored by AHC/ALLC (the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing). But the question that set the agenda for this conference was framed more broadly: how do we develop and sustain online humanities research and publication? The papers were distributed before the conference opened and so were not read at the meetings. Each presenter was assigned ten minutes to lay out some issues he or she felt to be important. The session was then opened to a free discussion from the eighty or so invited participants—other scholars and professional stakeholders—who made up the full complement of on-site discussants.

Because that is a political and institutional question, the conference spent little time on technical issues facing scholars who use digital media. Indeed, there is a growing sense among these scholars that the advancement of our learning is much less troubled by technological problems than by misfunctions within the broad humanities socius. Certain questions are especially insistent: How do we sustain the life of these digitally-organized projects; how do we effectively address their institutional obstacles and financial demands; how do we involve the greater community of students and scholars in online research and publication; how do we integrate these resources with our inherited material and paper-based depositories; how do we promote institutional collaborations to support innovative scholarship; how do we integrate online resources, which are now largely dispersed and isolated, into a connected network. Sustainability and institutional problems have emerged for many as the two overriding issues for scholars working with this new technology.

Those questions define a complex, multi-institutional, and multi-disciplinary problem. It is also a problem that goes to the heart of the legitimation crisis in the humanities, which has grown more pressing over the past twenty years.

Human memory—“the Mother of the Muses”—is the business of the humanist. The scholar works to preserve for the future an intimate connection between what Wordsworth called “the noble living and the noble dead.” As with the renaissance sped forward by the printing revolution of the fifteenth century, digital technology is driving a radical shift in humanities scholarship and education. The depth and character of the change can be measured by one simple but profound fact: the entirety of our cultural inheritance will have to be reorganized and re-edited within a digital horizon. Such an undertaking lays down institutional demands that our professional communities are less prepared to meet than they ought to be. See my “Culture and Technology. The Way We Live Now, What is to be Done,” NLH 36 (Winter, 2005): 71-82 ( (External Link) ) and “Textonics. Literary and Cultural Studies in a Quantum World” (http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/newsrel2002/mcgannlecture.pdf )