For the last few years, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has been sponsoring a series of discussions and events on the theme of “Imagining Canada’s future”, and one of these took place on our campus last Thursday night, featuring the work of Brian Greenspan (English) and the students in his “Hyperlab”. Those attending were treated to demonstrations of a variety of “apps” and games, in which historical events were mapped onto actual physical spaces, with the aim of bringing the past alive in a way that can be experienced by those in the present. And I always enjoy the opportunity to chat with my former University of Victoria faculty colleague, and now SSHRC president, Chad Gaffield. It was very kind of him to take the time to attend.
Digital Humanities (or DH as it is generally known) involves the application of new technologies to traditional humanities’ subjects such as literature and history. It is roughly a half century old, and yet still very much in its infancy. The reasons for that are multiple: humanities scholars tend to work individually, not in teams, and rarely possess themselves the requisite technical skills; and access to high-priced hardware and software is not easy to come by, especially if there are no obvious commercial applications. So, baby steps as yet, but enough has been done, in a wide variety of fields, to demonstrate the potential for a considerable sea change in the way that we organize and process information, and also how we communicate.
My own introduction to DH came a very long time ago, in the early 1960s. My father, then an academic at the University of Toronto, returned from a sabbatical sojourn at Oxford with a very strange item in his suitcase: the Greek text of the New Testament of the Christian Bible on a computer tape. I believe he was the first person in Canada to have such an object, and it certainly seemed quite exotic to this curious 11-year-old, even if I didn’t yet grasp its full significance. His own particular interest was in the authorship of those books claimed to have been written by the apostle Paul, and a digital text allowed statistical analysis of the use of individual words, or patterns of words, which would otherwise not have been possible.
Profound technological change has occurred at a number of points in human history, although the one that gets most of the press (pun fully intended) is Johann Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the 15th century. One of my own particular historical interests focuses on a much earlier disruption of the way in which knowledge was stored and disseminated, marked by the invention of the “codex”, or “book” as we know it, which happened in the Roman world sometime around the first century CE, replacing the older “roll”. (One of the earliest depictions of a codex occurs in a wall painting at Pompeii, providing a fixed terminus ante quem of the year 79.) Once again, change was slow, and we find both forms co-existing for a few centuries, before the possibilities of the new technology could be fully exploited, and widely demonstrated to be superior. For one thing, a book was easier to store and also to manipulate physically, especially if you wanted to use it for reference, rather than reading it cover to cover in a single sitting; but perhaps more importantly a page layout also opened up new possibilities for the addition of commentary and exegesis … in other words for “value added” scholarship related to the creation and interpretation of a “text” … that were not easily managed in a “roll”. And it is interesting to note that early experiments with DH followed much the same line with the addition of “metadata” in a “hypertext” format. Much of the scholarship of the Middle Ages involved the production of commentary on earlier writing, whether religious (for example, the Bible) or secular (Aristotle, Virgil, etc.), and a “book” format facilitated this beautifully.
Who knows where DH will lead us in the coming months and years? The answer is “no one”; and that is precisely why it is so exciting!