This would allow consumers (readers and scholars) of humanities literature to navigate through distributed information sources via concepts that they are interested in, rather than the objects (information sources) in which they are contained.

In other words, a person interested in all of the ports of call—or captains of the ship Santa Maria, or those interested in the price of a commodity on a given day in the past, could drill down through abstract concepts (codified as an ontological construct) such as “ships”, or “coffee”, and then into the time period that they are interested in, to find examples of the knowledge contained in the original texts (perhaps newspapers, or diaries, etc.).

In my mind, the “New Reading” is about the READER determining the knowledge that they consume—rather than consuming what is spoon-fed to them by an author.

The Gene Ontology’s (geneontology.org) annotation of genes for biological function provides a good example of the power of an ontology. Once humanities artifacts and concepts are codified into ontologies, can they be annotated, and then searched, in simillar ways.

Matthew Lange (mclange@ucdavis.edu)
Chocolate History Project
UC Davis

I’ll join this thread sideways. As a social scientist I am some distance removed from the McGann-Noto concerns about process, shop-talk, and over-conferencing in the humanities. I can not comment competently on that. But this resonates with a common concern that I share regarding some of the social sciences, namely too great a focus on method. The problem is not that methodological sophistication is itself bad, but that the methods focus – here is the analogue of McGann’s shop talk – often squeezes out the big substantive questions: what do we want to know? what are the unanswered questions? what problems are we trying to solve? what are the great debates? Our own conferences are susceptible methods entropy, in which contests about who has better data or a better equation deflate and diffuse the question of whether we have learned anything about the human condition.

So I’d add to McGann’s endorsement of identifying two or three digital applications important to the humanities a call for keeping an eye on the most compelling substantive questions that these initiatives would serve.

Bruce Bimber

i write briefly from london to say that, had i been dante
noto, i would have written in approximately the same way
about the funding application alan submitted.

and the issue reflects a disfeature of our current humanities
disciplines at large, which labor in an excess of
conferencing and shop talk.

to reframe shelley’s practical argument a bit, we need to
imagine that which we know.

digital technology for the humanities is now quite well
developed. we know enough at this point to be able to
develop—to conceive and build—useful online resources
of many kinds. better and more useful applications can’t
come until we actually start to build what we can now imagine, and
use the experience to go further. as we know, interesting
resources are already being developed
in lots of places. but there’s little coordination (which
doesn’t need conferencing to be brought about) and little
penetration to humanities educators at large (most still work
almost entirely in bibliographical frameworks and traditions).

i think we’d do a good and useful thing if everyone coming to
this conference prepared a set of two or three digital
applications or initiatives—things actually in development
at any stage—that seem important and relevant to digital
humanities. and annotate each item on the list with a
commentary on why you think its development is important as
well as how you think development might be promoted and extended.

jerry mcgann