Lecture: Getting from here to there (original) (raw)

Based on his keynote lecture at the international conference on Digital Humanities at Aalborg University in April 2014, John Naughton refl ects on being an engineer in a Humanities research institute that is currently seeking to adapt to the digital potentials and challenges. Th e Humanities represent an analytical, critical, or speculative approach whereas the so-called hard sciences focus on problem solving. Naughton discusses why he agrees with the authors of the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 and why the digitisation of the Humanities not only eff ects universities and scholars but also industrial and cultural life in general. To be honest, I feel like an intruder in this company. Full disclosure: I'm not a Humanities scholar. But I'm pleased to be here because two of the other speakers today were instrumental in getting me thinking about the subject of the symposium. When Helle Porsdam was a Fellow on the Arcadia Project (http://arcadiaproject.lib.cam.ac.uk/index.php) that I ran at Cambridge University Library between 2008 and 2012, she started me thinking about Digital Humanities in the context of the famous 'two cultures' debates that raged in Cambridge in the early 1960s-and have resonated ever since wherever people gather to discuss such things. And then, on 18 April 2012, Jeff rey Schnapp gave a really memorable talk in Cambridge that left me thinking about why the transition from traditional to digital humanities might not be straightforward-which is what I want to talk about today.