The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: Cultural Analytics

Hypertext. Hypermedia. High Performance Computing. It's enough to make a humanities scholar hyperventilate. A debate has raged in the last decade (at least) about whether or not the Digital Age will see the death of The Book, The Library and perhaps, The Humanities more broadly. Part of the debate resides in the historical separation that began with Erasmus and the Renaissance, where "hard" was divorced from the "soft" sciences and arts -- a division that is still visible both geographically and intellectually on university campuses, as well as amongst scholarly disciplines themselves. But some see the reciprocal and perhaps limitless possibilities of emergent technologies and humanities scholarship -- how digital technology cuts across disciplines, creates new ways of looking at artifacts, as well as producing new forms itself.

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