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 \u201cImagining Canada\u2019s future\u201d, and one of these took place on our campus last Thursday night, featuring the work of Brian Greenspan (English) and the students in his \u201cHyperlab\u201d.\u00a0 Those attending were treated to demonstrations of a variety of \u201capps\u201d 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.\u00a0 And I always enjoy the opportunity to chat with my former University of Victoria faculty colleague, and now SSHRC president, Chad Gaffield.\u00a0 It was very kind of him to take the time to attend.<\/p>\n
Digital Humanities (or DH as it is generally known) involves the application of new technologies to traditional humanities\u2019 subjects such as literature and history.\u00a0 It\u00a0is roughly a half century old, and yet still very much in its infancy.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
My own introduction to DH came a very long time ago, in the early 1960s.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s invention of movable type in the\u00a015th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 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 \u201ccodex\u201d, or \u201cbook\u201d as we know it, which happened in the Roman world sometime around the first century CE, replacing the older “roll”.\u00a0 (One of the earliest depictions of a codex occurs in a wall painting at Pompeii, providing a fixed terminus ante quem<\/i> of the year 79.)\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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 \u2026 in other words for \u201cvalue added\u201d scholarship related to the creation and interpretation of a \u201ctext\u201d \u2026 that were not easily managed in a \u201croll\u201d.\u00a0 And it is interesting to note that early experiments with DH followed much the same line with the addition of \u201cmetadata\u201d in a \u201chypertext\u201d format.\u00a0 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 \u201cbook\u201d format facilitated this beautifully.<\/p>\n Who knows where DH will lead us in the coming months and years?\u00a0 The answer is \u201cno one\u201d; and that is precisely why it is so exciting!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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”. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n