Thinking about interpretation: Pliny and scholarship in the humanities

http://pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk Our Digital Humanities community has been arguably in existence for about 50 years, and its pioneers – people like JB Smith and Rosanne Potter – expected right from the start that computing would have an enormous effect on scholarship. In fact, however, our effect on how most scholars work has been very small. Although tremendously innovative techniques have been developed by members of our community; few, if any, scholars from outside the DH community have taken them up. In the report on the Summit on Digital Tools in the Humanities held in September 2005 at the University of Virginia, the writers remarked that “only about six percent of humanist scholars go beyond general purpose information technology and use digital resources and more complex digital tools in their scholarship”, and they went on to claim that humanists are on the “verge of a revolutionary change” (Summit 2005; pg 4) that they claimed would be triggered by digital technology.