Humanist, the online discussion list for the Digital Humanities, run by Willard McCarty here at King’s College, London is now 20 years old. Renown for it’s erudite discussion, here is a telling snippet from Willard. Humanist must be one of the oldest lists on the Internet; perhaps the oldest. I would like to hear from anyone who knows of older lists.
Collaboration is a fine thing, but merely working together is not
enough, as the metaphor suggests in its depiction of a person’s
imagined spatial entrapment within his or her surrounding sphere,
which seems all the world, but isn’t. Building a common perspective
on computing — or better, a shared way of gaining perspectives — is
the state of maturity we’ve been growing ourselves into for more than
the last 20 years of Humanist’s being-in-the-world, which I celebrate
today. I like to compare our socio-intellectual place to a sea-going
explorer’s, on board a methodological vessel in an archipelago of
disciplines. Northrop Frye, combining the ancient definition of God
as “centre everywhere, circumference nowhere” (“centrum ubique,
circumferentia nusquam”) with Blake’s metaphor of “expanding eyes”,
spoke of one’s own discipline-of-origin as a centre of all knowledge
that expands into all others. The key is the expanding.
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