So today hardly was a productive DH day for me. Indeed most of my work day was devoted to planning a training session whose topic seems quite remote from Humanities Computing. I met two colleagues to talk about linguistic and communicational patterns in the practice of hypnosis, which is a fascinating subject. From time to time, my internal monologue brought me back to Digital Humanities. I was wondering how such studies could benefit from digital technologies or from a computational approach, and whether connections could be made with the emerging field of Digital Rhetoric.
The so-called “Digital Rhetoric” is my last chance of the day to express a feeling I have as a French academic interested in DH. In fact, this is the kind of research and teaching trends which I learn about through Twitter, RSS feeds and the such. I eagerly witness their extent and growth in the United States and some other countries. But they remain very far from what I could actually teach and study here. This is obviously an exciting period in France too (in spite of all the dark threats in academia); the importance of digitalisation is being acknowledged and research infrastructure is being built. Nevertheless, the institutional development is so different that in many respects I feel there is a huge lag, or a gap.
However, to me the digital humanities are a core component of “the sweet hereafter”. Yesterday, I had a long and fruitful work session with Matteo Romanello on a digital edition project (Digital Athenaeus, aka Athénée numérique). In this field, more precisely in the digital scholarly editing of ancient texts, I am sure we will see and foster thrilling transformations. One of my next tasks is a review of existing online critical editions. This will be a wonderful thing to do.
Are these paragraphs guilty of academic narcissism? Well, it seems to me that the Day of DH is also about bearing witness to personal and national situations.
By the way, here is how I had (not) defined the field: “Digital Humanities: A riddle the humanist has to tackle now if he wants to be a contemporary of his own time. — See also: Computer; Conundrum; Humanités numériques.”
Now it’s time for the laptop to go to sleep… À l’année prochaine!
