The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanities

.............................................................................................................................. 2
 Introduction......................................................................................................................... 2
 Problem Statement .............................................................................................................. 3
 Scholarly Information Infrastructure .................................................................................. 4
 Science [and, or, versus] the Humanities............................................................................ 5
 Publication practices ................................................................................................................................... 6
 Data in digital scholarship .......................................................................................................................... 8
 What are data?........................................................................................................................................ 9
 Data as evidence..................................................................................................................................... 9
 Data sources ......................................................................................................................................... 10
 Research methods ..................................................................................................................................... 12
 Collaboration............................................................................................................................................. 14
 Incentives to participate ............................................................................................................................ 15
 Learning .................................................................................................................................................... 17
 Summary ........................................................................................................................... 19
 A Call to Action ................................................................................................................ 20
 What are data?........................................................................................................................................... 20
 What are the infrastructure requirements?................................................................................................ 21
 Where are the social studies of digital humanities?.................................................................................. 21
 What is the humanities laboratory of the 21 century?............................................................................. 21
 What is the value proposition for digital humanities in an era of declining budgets?.............................. 21
 Acknowledgements........................................................................................................... 22
 References......................................................................................................................... 22
 1 Based on Keynote Presentation to Digital Humanities ’09 Conference, College Park, MD, June 23, 2009 Borgman DHQ Article Submission, SS PDF, September 16, 2009, page 2 of 30