Many thanks for sharing these thoughts. At the moment I only have time 
for a couple of brief comments, but I did want to say that your 
discussion is valuable.

Martin Mueller wrote:

> Digitization changes the time calculus of many activities. Separately 
> these changes may be trivial. Together they produce a change in kind. 

This is an important observation, and I think true a lot of the time. 
The example of the TLG I adduced yesterday is a case in point: the time 
savings brought about by this relatively simple database are phenomenal. 
I can now perform a piece of research in five minutes which once upon a 
time would have taken me sixty years--to read and internalise all of 
classical literature and collect references to Pampharmakos and related 
words to write that lifelong comprehensive monograph. (OK, I exaggerate 
the five minutes, it still takes longer than that to write the 
definitive monograph, and some years reading and internalising 
literature were of course necessary, but I have saved a good proportion 
of those sixty years nonetheless...) This is, as you say, more than a 
change in scale, it is a paradigm shift in the *kinds* of research that 
can be done. And this is a crude--if incredibly powerful--tool.

> Just about any interesting aspect of digitization can be represented as 
> flowing from calculations about the time it takes to do this or that. 

This is also an interesting observation, and I think more challenging 
than the first. (I would here use "problematic" in a positive sense.) 
Digital Humanists are in the habit of saying that (1) computing 
technology does not merely speed up the way we work--that would indeed 
be trivial--but changes the very nature of the questions we can ask. 
They are also in the habit of saying that (2) we do and must let our 
humanities agenda--the texts, the research questions--drive the work we 
do, and not the technology. Computing is a tool to digital humanists, 
not an end in itself. I believe these two positions are incompatible 
(and I don't claim to be making a new or clever point here--Hugh Denard 
made a similar argument in a debate at the 2005 DRH conference, for 
example.)

So long as (2) is true, then all that computing technology does for the 
humanist is speed up the work we can do, to answer the questions we are 
already asking better and more quickly. It is only when we play with the 
new technology, when we're not afraid to say "what does this button 
do?", when we let the computing drive our agenda rather than asking all 
of the same old questions (as Willard points out) that it becomes true 
to say that Humanities Computing changes the very nature of the 
questions we can ask. And sometimes, just sometimes, asking the same 
question through a different medium, with different evidence, and 
different expectations reveals a whole new question that is hardly 
recognisable to the traditional scholar. And it may be, as you point out 
in the following paragraphs of your article, that this medium no longer 
saves us time at all, since this newly articulated question requires us 
to go away and write new software, populate a new database, engage with 
a whole new research agenda, than the same question would have done when 
all we were using was the TLG and the apparatus criticus of a couple of 
Teubners.

Thanks again for your thoughts, and apologies for my not so "brief 
comments" on a small part of them.

Regards,

Gabriel

-- 
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Dr Gabriel BODARD
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
Kay House
7, Arundel Street
London WC2R 3DX

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Tel: +44 (0)20 78 48 13 88
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