Humanities Computing: A Federation of Disciplines John Nerb onne Alfa-Informatica University of Groningen
[email protected] http://www.let.rug.nl/alfa/ Series: Is Humanities Computing an Academic Discipline? Organized by John Unsworth University of Virginia Oct. 29, 1999 RROPQR IJ Federation KL MN Federation Thesis: Humanities Computing (HC) is not a discipline (yet), but a federation of co op erating disciplines. a discipline is demarcated by a subject matter a range of analytical techniques one or more comp eting theories where appropriate, practical applications caution: these are claims ab out elds, not ab out every piece of work, or every scholar's cumulative work HC has neither coherent subject matter nor theory (apart from its comp onents) RROPQR 1 IJ Vision KL MN Federation Humanities Computing is ...die Fortsetzung der Geisteswissen- schaften mit anderen Mitteln. (with ap ologies to Clausewitz, Battus). unsurprising but signicant HC must engage traditional Humanities HC's primary value is within traditional Humanities which traditional Humanities problems have we solved? opp osed to view that HC's purp ose is to understand digital culture using humanities metho ds studies comparing printing press to computers Electronic Incunabula (Nerb onne, 1995) linguistic studies of computer-mediated communication literary studies of hyp ertext vs. planar text recent prop osal from Dutch Science CouncilWTR interesting, but not HC's job RROPQR 2 IJ Parallel? KL MN Federation in general, scholarship makes use of all available