Although Bill Gates famously remarked, ‘The paper-based book, magazine, or newspaper still has a lot of advantages over its digital counterpart’ (Gates 1996: 130), the digital text is becoming increasingly important in the arts and humanities communities. The arts and humanities have long enjoyed a close relationship with the library and information science community, to the great benefit of both. Recent strategic developments in the former, however, particularly the launch in 2005 of the AHRC-JISC-EPSRC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative (http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/e-science), necessitate a re-examination of what arts and humanities need from digital textual technologies. Although the ‘digital humanities’ traditionally have an extensive overlap with textual analysis and research, the obvious point must be made that the use and research of text is by no means confined to the humanities: the scientific and industrial sectors are just as dependent on text. Therefore, engagement between the existing body of expertise and experience in the text-driven digital humanities and the advanced network and grid technologies ushered in by the e-science programme, is in the interest of all. To this end, the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHeSSC) at King’s College London organized a workshop at the 2007 e-Science All Hands Meeting in Nottingham (http://www.allhands.org.uk/news/textgridws_call.cfm), entitled Text and Grid: Research Questions for the Humanities, Sciences and Industry. This report summarises the main points that emerged from that workshop, and outlines a medium-term research agenda for how that process of engagement can proceed (link)
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