Asking Questions and Building a Research Agenda for Digital Scholarship

At a critical moment in the movie The Unbearable Lightness of Being,1 the audience sees a glass tremble on a table. Because the story is set in Prague Spring of 1968, we know the rattling glass and then the faint rumble signal the arrival of Soviet tanks. But the tremors go unnoticed by the characters, Tomas, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, and Tereza, played by Juliette Binoche, who are arguing over their disintegrating relationship. She decides to leave him, steps out into the street, and realizes that there has been an invasion. In this scene, the director Philip Kaufman has engaged in an elegant bit of storytelling that takes advantage both of the audience’s knowledge, which exceeds that of the characters, and the attributes of the medium. He uses film, photography, and sound to fill in the story around the narrative conveyed by the script to evoke apprehensive, emotional responses from the audience precisely because they are more knowledgeable than the characters. It is similar to the poignancy that accompanies a good production of Romeo and Juliet. Yes, we know it will not end well, but somehow every time, we root for the lovers. In the case of this film, the audience’s foreknowledge is triggered by adroit use of the camera and the medium rather than by familiarity with the story. So it is with computation and humanities scholarship. We have inherited a cyberinfrastructure of systems, data, and services that arose from and is optimized for research in science and engineering. As a result, humanists have access to technology but are in search of questions: What scholarship becomes possible when, from their desktops, scholars can access vast stores of admittedly highly heterogeneous data together with powerful capabilities for analysis and presentation? In the terms set by this scene, how do we use computAsking Questions and Building a Research Agenda for Digital Scholarship