digital humanities

At the suggestion of David Durand at Tizra, I met John Cayley at Blue State Coffee and we talked about "electronic writing." It's been a while since I've been in - or thought about - this world much.

We spoke of many things, but one thing that struck me was an observation he made about the preponderance of "digital humanities" programs, projects, efforts. "Digital Humanities" in large part, refers to online databanks (sophisticated and beautiful though they may be) of what are traditional materials - books, letters, print resources - digitized - the emphasis being in preserving these materials. What of the work that is being created specifically for a digital environment? And what does that mean for the work of the public humanities?

There are occasional references to the "new humanities," which frequently address online "web 2.0" tools in some way or another. I like to think about weblogs specifically - the beauty of which is the fact that they are embedded in media. The best ones capture that sense of deep interconnectedness - that one could move effortlessly (or nearly so) from text to image to video to audio, to and from different types of websites - those that are online versions of traditional print pieces (the "brochure") to those that are more fluid and dynamic.