Introduction Beginning Again: Humanities and Digital Culture, 1993–2000

Abstract

Humanities computing is beginning again. It passed through one coherent period of historical development and, more recently, through an exploratory interlude of considerable importance. This book examines that interlude, the years 1993 to 2000, from the perspective of a project I undertook at exactly the same moment (fortuitously as it happened): The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A Hypermedia Research Archive (“The Rossetti Archive”).¹ Working on the archive during those years, I began to see more clearly the kinds of change that are coming to literary and humanistic studies. These changes will bring to the center of scholarly procedures theoretical models that have been perceived until now as odd, idiosyncratic, nonnormal.

we’re like the man who climbed on a chair and declared he was a little closer to the moon.

—Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do