What is Digital Humanities?

This is a forum that was on earlier this year. Willard McCarty is from Kings College London, a leader in the field of Digital Humanities. I think that the issue that McCarty is stressing is that Arts Informatics is a practice; ie. it requires an advancement of both the technologies that are useful for the humanities and the ideas that are central to the humanities. As I glean from this, the problem with the Chris Chester approach is that it is only the sound of ‘one hand clapping’ (Australia doesn’t really have a real Arts informatics program anywhere).

And I think this is why the Arts Informatics program was renamed at Sydney. ie it wasn’t really ‘Arts Informatics’ as in understood in the International arena (even before Chester); it’s critical cultural theory and Information systems (which is fine btw, but in my mind, the Digital Humanities is something else).

Also see this report (Feb 2004) that is an application for ARC (Australian Research Council) funding for an Australian E-Humanities research network, that was unfortunatly unsuccesfull.

ARTS INFORMATICS SEMINAR: WHAT IS DIGITAL HUMANITIES?

11am Monday 6 February 2006
Rogers Room
John Woolley Building
University of Sydney

Dr Willard McCarty
Reader in Humanities Computing
King’s College London

RSVP by Fri Feb 3 to pat.ricketts at arts.usyd.edu.au

Arts Informatics Seminar

The School of English, Art History, Film and Media (SEAFAM) at the
University of Sydney is delighted to present a seminar by a leading
international theorist in the Digital Humanities, Willard McCarty,
Reader in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at Kings
College, London.

The Arts Informatics program (in SEAFAM) studies digital
communication and culture: the points where the methods and concerns
of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences encounter information and
communication technologies. This seminar will address some basic
questions about how different traditions of creative, interpretative
and qualitative social and cultural research relate to information
technologies.

“The sound of two hands clapping is sometimes hard to hear,
or Comments on the digital vs the invocative views of computing
for the arts and letters”

In this talk I respond to Chris Chesher’s ctheory.net paper, “Why the
digital computer is dead” (a106), by setting the question of digital
representation into the context of Michael Polanyi’s philosophy of
tacit knowing. The “two hands” of my title refer to the
phenomenological cycle or see-saw of ‘attending from’ and ‘attending
to’ digital tools. I argue that both hands are required properly to
celebrate and fully engage with the digital, but I concentrate
primarily on the analytic half of the engagement.

— Willard McCarty

Related Links

John Woolley Building on University of Sydney campus:
http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/directories/map/building.stm?location=12E

Ctheory article ‘Why the digital computer is dead’ by Chris Chesher
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=334

Willard McCarty’s homepage at Kings College London
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/

Centre for Computing in the Humanities
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/

Arts Informatics at University of Sydney
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/informatics