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James J. O’Donnell

Engaging the humanities:
the digital humanities

We seldom speak of the electrical,

the automotive, or the aeronautical hu-
manities, for all that those technologies
have done to revolutionize the social
order of scholarship and transform the
practices of scholars. Someday we will
no longer speak, I am sure, of the “digi-
tal humanities”; but for now the phrase
is needed to distinguish the new objects,
techniques, and contexts of study from
those today’s senior scholars inherited
from their forebears. A full professor
today certainly sat at the feet of scholars
who never thought of using a computer
for any scholarly purpose whatsoever
and just as certainly teaches students for
whom the computer (perhaps even the
net-enabled cell phone) is the ½rst essen-
tial tool of every piece of academic work.

James J. O’Donnell is professor of classics and
provost at Georgetown University. Elected a Fel-
low of the Medieval Academy in 2002, he has
served as president of the American Philological
Association and as a trustee of the National Hu-
manities Center and of the American Council of
Learned Societies. His publications include “Av-
atars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace”
(1998), “Augustine: A New Biography” (2005),
and “The Ruin of the Roman Empire” (2008).

Twenty-one years ago, Willard Mc-
Carty, currently professor of humanities
computing at King’s College London,
formed an email discussion group called
“Humanist,” open to all those curious
about what computing could do for the
sciences humaines, or humanities for comput-
ing. The list still flourishes, but veterans
of the ½rst few years speak of the conver-
sations from around 1990 as if they had
known one of the great salons of Paris in
the eighteenth century or one of the cof-
fee houses of Vienna in the nineteenth.
Before we scattered to evangelize and
work in our own disciplines and subdis-
ciplines, institutions and departments,
nous, a modest group of true believers,
met at “Humanist” to share a future
none had yet seen. It was beyond obvi-
ous to all of us taking part in those early
conversations that the content, meth-
ods, and modes of organization of hu-
manistic scholarship were about to be
changed, and utterly so.

Were we right? No one reflecting
on the changes in habits of consuming
and producing information that have
developed in the last two decades can
fail to be astonished by what is possible.
Oceans of text, libraries of journal con-
tents, and tens of millions of words of
email group, chat room, and blogo-
sphere opining now surround us. A col-

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James J.
O’Donnell
on the
sciences humaines

lection of what I recalled as infrequent,
brief, and desultory email messages over
the last decade about a piece of personal
business turned out, on downloading, à
comprise 150,000 words–a book-length
manuscript with no real physical dimen-
sions at all, just miraculously present
wherever on the planet my three-pound
laptop should travel. jstor, Muse, Goo-
gle Books, Early English Books Online,
the Brown Women Writers Project, le
Patrologia Latina Database, the Open
Content Alliance, to name a few: consid-
ering the riches available at just the click
of a mouse from these resources, je me souviens
spending childhood years at an army
post in the desert, where the homes and
libraries probably contained less of the
heritage of civilized culture and scholar-
ship than what now travels on the hard
disk of my laptop, certainly far less than
what I can access from a hotel room in
Beijing or Doha on that laptop. If I am
now surrounded by more books, plus
physical paper than ever, it is in large
measure because Amazon makes over-
night delivery all too easy.

But is this a revolution or only auto-
mation? The solitary labor of scholars,
the objects of their study (for the most
part), and the vehicles of publication
and communication remain surpris-
ingly stable, close to what scholars have
known for generations. We have nearly
mastered the production of “electronic
journaux,” whereby intellectual form and
content duplicate the expectations of
quarterly print journal publication of a
generation ago, though the distribution
now may be via pdf or other electronic
medium as well as on paper. (Bryn Mawr
Classical Review has just been told that a
major indexing service cannot handle
our digital output because we do not pro-
vide pdf ½les imitating print.) We speak
glibly of “electronic books,” by which
we mean collections of photographs or

pdf images of words arranged in a way
that makes sense only if we continue
to assume the physical form and limita-
tions of the codex. When I read my col-
league’s offprint from a printout of a
pdf that she has emailed to me, nothing
essential has changed, except that I now
bear the cost and effort of the printing
moi-même. Pioneer of media theory Mar-
shall McLuhan, who argued that the
content of a new medium is, at its out-
ensemble, an old medium, a, it seems, been
proven right once again.

More surprising than the progress we

have made are the promises yet unful-
½lled. We live in an age in which com-
munication media are in a near-constant
state of upheaval, with consequent dra-
matic relocation of authority and influ-
ence in cultural relations. But our class-
rooms today still look and feel like our
old classrooms, with technology often
present only in the form of high-end pre-
sentation facilities for instructors or as
the topic of a guerrilla war to determine
whether students shall be allowed to use
their wireless laptops in class, si
those laptops might be used in the real
service of their learning–or might be
used just to surf, chat, and gamble, le
better to ½ll the distraction and bore-
dom that were probably there all along.

This peculiar position of humanistic

learning, betwixt and between pasts
and futures, has occasioned reasonable
and thoughtful comment for some years
now. Le 2006 report, Our Cultural Com-
monwealth, published by the American
Council of Learned Societies (acls)
and arising from the discussions of a
blue-ribbon commission organized by
the acls, introduced humanists to the
word cyberinfrastructure as a way of pro-
voking reflection on the proximate and
future needs of scholars for hardware,
software, services, and leadership de-

100

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signed to allow us to make best use of in-
formation technology in our work. Mais
we remain stuck.

When humanists gather to discuss
these subjects, three themes emerge
from their conversations. D'abord, they re-
main preoccupied with issues of tradi-
tional publication. Université Harvard,
long a hotbed of innovation and icono-
clasm, has contributed its mite to the de-
bate by this year requiring its scholars to
distribute their work freely to the world
on an open-access model, assuming as
it made that requirement the obligation
of creating, hosting, and preserving an
“institutional repository” to manage the
distribution. While it is a relief to think
that Harvard’s ½ne scholars will ½nally
begin to see their works have the influ-
ence they deserve, it is fair to wonder
whether this action solves a real prob-
lem or only strikes a pose. After at least
½fteen years of evangelism for Open Ac-
cess, there exists no proven business
model for sustaining that practice as a
general means of publication, and tradi-
tional (often commercial) journal publi-
cation remains robustly healthy, having
demonstrated for ½fty years that com-
mercial publishers can distribute more
scholarly and scienti½c information
more widely than ever before in histo-
ry. It is a real and important question
whether the subscriber-pays journal
can or should be replaced by the author-
pays (or author’s-institution-pays) jour-
nal that is free to all readers; but what
remains without question is the fact
que, even in cyberspace, there are no
free lunches.

Preoccupation, meanwhile, avec
the best technique for distributing tra-
ditional materials to audiences that do
not yet know they want them distracts
from other concerns. Scholars who dis-
cuss these issues know well that a fun-
damental social transition has not yet

taken place. What does it take to be-
come a scholar and acquire the standing
and resources to pursue a life of learn-
ing? The road to tenure for humanists
still runs through the editorial of½ces of
university presses. Learned societies and
even provosts have declared ½rmly that
full faith and credit should be given to
innovative forms of publication and
scholarship, but printed monographs
reign. Nowhere has it been established
that you cannot get tenure for digital
travail; but in the absence of proof that
you can, prudence decrees that the book
is the thing. Given the rising age of assis-
tant professors (as more time is spent
pre-tenure on post-doctoral work, short-
term jobs, and the like), we see more
and more scholars spending more and
more of their earthly lives waiting for
the liberation that tenure begins. C'est
not proven that waiting for one’s forties
is the best way to ensure a career of in-
novation and experimentation.

Preoccupation with existing forms of
publication and concern for career-mak-
ing prudence dominate conversations
that sidestep a deeper anxiety. In princi-
ple, we know that there are tools and
techniques at hand that could radically
alter existing paradigms of work and
open new doors of inquiry and under-
standing; but who will show us how to
use them? For a historian to learn data-
base design, gis, or techniques of mul-
timedia presentation is no easy thing
–and the senior historian is not the
½rst person to look to for instruction. UN
monograph based on the paper archives
of nuns in Montana seems a whole lot
easier to imagine and execute than an
investigation of the economic geogra-
phy of ecclesiastical institutions that
integrates census and real estate trans-
action databases, mapping tools, visuel
archives, and oral history from all ½fty
states (much less one that crosses na-

Engaging
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the digital
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James J.
O’Donnell
on the
sciences humaines

tional borders), and prudence once
again prevails. It is as though we have
moved into a space far larger–vertigi-
nously, acrophobically larger–than the
one we have traditionally occupied, et
we respond by keeping to our habitual
scope and sphere of activity. Pendant que là
are leaders in imagining new kinds of
work with new kinds of results, the ordi-
nary business of departments of human-
istic learning goes on in 2008 much as it
did in 1988 and even 1968, for all that the
personnel may be refreshingly more di-
verse than before.1
We as humanists must challenge our-

selves to ask whether and how we will
imagine that new space within which
we can work now, and how we can begin
to occupy it well. Everyone recognizes
that waiting for technologists to provide
tools and, worse, tell us what to do with
them is no solution, for the questions of
scholarship must come from scholars.
But the power of imagination does re-
quire concrete supplementation from
those who know what the tools can do.
So far, only locally and episodically have
we found settings within which innova-
tive scholars and sympathetic technol-
ogists can enter into a dialogue of exper-
imentation and interrogation, the better
to ½nd good and important questions
that can now yield answers hitherto
thought impossible. Institutions build-

1 From 2002–2006, the National Humani-
ties Center presented an annual Richard W.
Lyman Award (with funding from the Rock-
efeller Foundation) for achievement in hu-
manistic scholarship making resourceful use
of information technology. The recipients,
Jerry McGann of Virginia, the late Roy Ro-
senzweig of George Mason, Robert Englund
of ucla, John Unsworth of Illinois, and Wil-
lard McCarty of London, are exemplars of far-
seeing work.

102

Dædalus Winter 2009

ing repositories to hold the inert con-
tent of the work now published in mul-
tiple forms at least should be construct-
ing laboratories for real innovation and
experimentation and making it possible
to populate them with the senior and ju-
nior scholars and resourceful technical
interlocutors who can collaborate in in-
venting a future we have not yet entered.
Such institutional ventures face obsta-

cles not insurmountable, but daunting
nonetheless. The resources that would
be devoted to creating such research
and development opportunities to sup-
port our own professional future are
seen inevitably as taking away from the
resources needed to deliver instruction
and scholarship in the present. Ask any
department chair how many faculty
lines she will give up in order to get such
a laboratory and the answer is likely to
be a ½rm “zero”–and not only or neces-
sarily because departments look ½rst to
the upholstery of their own nests, mais
more likely because the economics and
governance of higher education make it
most probable that every academic unit
is too thinly staffed to deliver the high-
est quality education at its current level
of ambition to the crowded classrooms
that we face. When there are too few
professors, diverting resources to invest
in the future is super½cially unattractive.
Can we successfully make the case that
it is, at any rate, necessary?

And what if we succeed? Let me cau-
tion ½rst that we should make sure we
know what we will do if our dreams
come true. Long inured to an econom-
ics of scarcity, in which every fragment
of information from our cultural past is
lovingly cherished and studied in detail,
we have yet to think seriously and re-
make our cultural practices to cope with
the inevitability that information sup-
porting virtually every kind of scholar-
ship will, in time, be available in an

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abundance that will demolish any at-
tempt to do justice to each piece of
evidence in traditional ways. The nine-
teenth-century novel is an object of
loving study for all of those who do
not have to read every single novel pub-
lished in that hundred years; but Google
will soon make something approaching
that totality ubiquitously available and
in principle unavoidable. What makes
sense as a proposition about that sub-
ject when no living individual or even
no conceivable team of scholars can
master the material? That question has
an answer or answers, and the exhilara-
tion of the next generation of study can
and should come from innovative, icon-
oclastic scholars beginning to ask it.2
Deuxième, we should remember that
Euro-American humanists have not
made the world their oyster in the last
generation. The work of serious schol-
ars in the humanities is a tiny fraction
of the totality of global investment in
higher education or in cultural produc-
tion. In the world of commercial cultur-
al products, such relative rarity is a sign
of a niche market, a luxury product.3
For us, cependant, the risk is rather that
of becoming an orphan brand, scarce
enough to be neglected and not valuable
enough to be cherished. It is not neces-

2 Jonathan Gottschall of Washington and Jef-
ferson College offered a ½rst-pass answer at
just such a question in a May 11, 2008, article
in The Boston Globe. The article anticipated his
book Literature, Science, and a New Humanities
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

3 In a lecture at Georgetown in 2006, the ep-
onym of a famous global luxury brand said
that he judged the maximum size of a luxury
product’s market was $3 milliard; sell more
than that and you lose your cachet. Yves Saint-
Laurent was snif½ngly dismissed as a luxury
goods maker who had become vulgar in that
chemin.

sary to take sides in any of the “culture
wars” of the last century to observe that
the nature and form of the work of hu-
manistic scholars since the 1960s has
produced self-marginalization more
than envy or admiration. Even within
the academy, petit, tense conversations
occur when it is observed that humani-
ties-wide peer review bodies (reading
applications for distinguished fellow-
ships, say) show a strong predilection
for work in history and historicizing
cultural study over critical work in liter-
ature or theory. Even academic publish-
ers express concern at the relative sag in
sales for literary scholarship.

No amount of digital tintinnabula-
tion or expulsive labial frication can
in themselves ½nd an audience. Some
work naturally expects and is satis½ed
with an esoteric readership. But histor-
ically the best work for the few has ex-
isted on a continuum with work that
makes itself, at least, understood to the
many and succeeds, at best, in making
clear that what goes on in the quiet of
a seminar room is important in itself,
even for those who do not understand
it. We have undeniably lost ground in
the contest for respect.

Can a more resourceful kind of schol-

arly performance in new spaces help us
in winning back respect and resources?
Packaging is unlikely to be enough. UN
combination of original work and imag-
inative presentation is what is needed.
We are unlikely to come to such a com-
bination without fresh thinking about
what we do, but we are equally unlikely
to come to it without fresh thinking
about how we do it and how we present
it to an audience.

The community of scholars is alive
and lively. None of the fears I express
here represent inevitable loss, nor is
innovation unimaginably far away. Le

Engaging
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sciences humaines:
the digital
sciences humaines

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James J.
O’Donnell
on the
sciences humaines

concrete steps we need are undoubted-
ly few in number, but must be marked
by imagination, reach, and courage.
We should ½ght our battles to preserve
and ensure the right to quote, étude,
and make reasonable scholarly use of
the cultural record without undue limi-
tation by unenlightened application of
the copyright statutes. We must work
with publishers, librarians, and public
agencies to make sure that the cultural
record (y compris, increasingly, the digi-
tal record) is preserved for the future.
Thinking through what it is to “edit”
that record–that is, to make it intellec-
tually accessible for serious users–will
require innovation and deserves the re-
spect of promotion and tenure commit-
tees. Access to resources, technical and
human, that support scholarly ambition
is a battle to be fought at the local level,
but one to be supported by wise public
funding and philanthropy nationally
and internationally.

À la fin, the work is ours. Do we
have the right questions to ask? Do we
have the right disciplinary alignments?
Are we making the new (including the
very products of cyberspace) a part of
our own sphere of study and interpre-
tation as responsibly and carefully as
we maintain the old (and link the study
of old and new)? Will we be ambitious
enough in our questions to ½nd answers
large enough and worthy of our culture
and our contemporaries? We are the
heirs of a long tradition of civilization
and its cultures, but that means that in
our space and time we are that civiliza-
tion, which can only be what we in the
academy together with the many be-
yond the academy’s walls, living in a
common space of imagination, analyse,
and truth, make of it. There is every rea-
son for optimism about our chances as
scholars to maintain and expand a place
in the culture’s discourse; but there is

104

Dædalus Winter 2009

very nearly every reason for pessimism
aussi. Which will prevail? The jury is
out.4

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4 I am happy to express my thanks to Pauline
Yu and Steve Wheatley of the acls for asking
me to organize and chair a panel at the May
2008 annual meeting of the acls in Pittsburgh
on issues related to the theme of this essay, et
to Peter Bol (Harvard), Tara McPherson (usc),
Don Brenneis (ucsc), Jim Chandler (Chicago),
and Mike Keller (Stanford) for their lively, pro-
vocative, and imaginative participation in that
forum. This essay would not have taken the
form it does without the bene½t of that conver-
sation.
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