One of the more difficult areas that the more service focussed domain of the Digital Humanities traverses is between infrastructure development (ie. large computing systems that link various institutions together) and broader discipline-specific debates in the humanities. A tenured historian or linguist, with many years experience of the field, may be confronted by the decisions needed to implement a large computing system. The skills of the historian or linguist may involve critical debate, close reading of text, argument, and synthesis of competing evidence into an academic monologue. However, the decisions needed to build large computing infrastructures exist in an entirely different set of debates and more importantly, ways to debate. The historian may say ‘I don’t agree’. And the infrastructure developer might say ‘I don’t care if you don’t agree with the moon; show us a model’. Traversing realities and negotiating between realities is difficult; partly because most people believe their reality is the only reality.
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