Recent­ly, Matt Kirschen­baum, Eng­lish Pro­fes­sor at Mary­land, Asso­ciate Direc­tor of the Mary­land Inis­ti­tute for Tech­nol­o­gy in the Human­i­ties, and author of Mech­a­nisms, tweet­ed a request for “absolute­ly foun­da­tion­al” arti­cles or chap­ters for “an intro­duc­tion to the dig­i­tal human­i­ties.”  The fol­low­ing is my list, in chrono­log­i­cal order.

1. Van­nevar Bush, 1945, “As We May Think.”
2. Claude Shan­non, 1948, “A Math­e­mat­i­cal The­o­ry of Communication.”
3. Nor­bert Wiener, 1954, “Orga­ni­za­tion is the Message.”
4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955, “The Struc­tur­al Study of Myth.”
5. Ben­jamin Col­by, 1966, “Cul­ture Pat­terns in Narrative.”
6. Gre­go­ry Bate­son, 1967, “Style, Grace, and Infor­ma­tion in Prim­i­tive Art.”
7. Rod­ney Need­ham, 1975, “Poly­thet­ic Classification.” *
8. Jean-François Lyotard, 1979, The Post­mdern Condition.
9. Ted Nel­son, 1980, Lit­er­ary Machines.
10. Wal­ter Ong, 1982, Oral­i­ty and Lit­er­a­cy.
11. Lucy Such­man, 1988, “Rep­re­sent­ing Prac­tice in Cog­ni­tive Science.” *
12. Dou­glas Adams, 1990. Hyper­land. *
13. Diana Forsythe, 1993, “The Con­struc­tion of Work in Arti­fi­cial Intelligence.” *
14. Steven Bird and Mark Liber­man, 1999, “Anno­ta­tion graphs as a frame­work for mul­ti­di­men­sion­al lin­guis­tic data analysis.”
15. Lev Manovich, 2001, “Data­base as Sym­bol­ic Form.”
16. John Unsworth, 2001, “Knowl­edge Rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Human­i­ties Computing.”
17. Stephen Ram­sey, 2005, “In Praise of Pattern.”
18. Tim Bern­ers-Lee, 2006, “Linked Data–Design Issues.”

* These were added after the orig­i­nal post.  I reserve the write to amend and anno­tate this list at any time … 🙂

Here are a few qualifiers.

Num­ber one, I don’t think there are, strict­ly speak­ing, any foun­da­tion­al texts in the dig­i­tal human­i­ties.  Not in the way that physics can claim New­ton’s Prin­cip­ia or biol­o­gy Dar­win’s Ori­gin.  I am not sure if this sit­u­a­tion is due to the (peren­ni­al) infan­cy of the field–if, indeed, it is a field.  (I think of it more as a cross-dis­pli­nary method­ol­o­gy.)  More­over, my say­ing so cer­tain­ly isn’t due to any dis­taste on my part for the con­cept of a canon.  Instead, there are, rough­ly cor­re­spond­ing to the pre- and post-war era of the pre­vi­ous cen­tu­ry, a num­ber of loose­ly relat­ed essays that adum­brate a set of ideas which sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of peo­ple who call them­selves dig­i­tal human­ists have been unpack­ing.  The lat­ter have pro­duced a num­ber of essays which the majori­toy of dig­i­tal human­ists will have read, and these may be called foun­da­tion­al, in the sense of a shared dis­course.   Fair enough.   But none of these texts can claim the sta­tus of hav­ing defined a method or a domain that we can, in ret­ro­spect, claim as dis­tinct­ly con­cern­ing the dig­i­tal human­i­ties. Also–and here I will be controversial–I believe that this par­tic­u­lar cor­pus has had the effect of pro­duc­ing, though the hyer­co­her­ence that can affect small “thought col­lec­tives” (Fleck),  a rather nar­row set of con­cerns which have put the field into a groove from which it would do well to extri­cate itself.

Num­ber two, since I con­sid­er the dig­i­tal human­i­ties to be at once crit­i­cal and prac­ti­cal, these texts come from both angles, one set con­cerned with method, the oth­er with his­tor­i­cal context.

Num­ber three, parts of this list are, as you’ll quick­ly see, pret­ty spe­cif­ic to me, and my back­ground as an Amer­i­can cul­tur­al anthro­pol­o­gist with strong Eng­lish and French influ­ences.  These are texts that have been foun­da­tion­al to my con­cep­tion of the dig­i­tal human­i­ties, and which have made a dif­fer­ence to my way of think­ing about tex­tu­al­i­ty, dig­i­tal tex­tu­al­i­ty, and what hap­pens to text when it becomes dig­i­tal.  But it is not entire­ly idio­syn­crat­ic.  In its defense, I would argue that the dig­i­tal human­i­ties is more close­ly tied with the struc­tural­ism of the 1950s and 60s  than is usu­al­ly recognized–and indeed, more than struc­tural­ists are pre­pared to admit.  (There is an impor­tant chap­ter of intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry that needs to be writ­ten here, con­cern­ing the close but rel­a­tive­ly hid­den rela­tion­ship between struc­tural­ism and the “cyber­net­ic moment.”)  More­over, the anthro­po­log­i­cal angle is always worth push­ing, inso­far as the dis­ci­pline, before its reflex­ive self-implo­sion in the 1980s and 90s, bequeathed the cul­ture con­cept on which the realign­ment of the human­i­ties and itner­pre­tive social sci­ences has been con­struct­ed.  From an anthro­pol­o­gist’s view, the wild suc­cess of cul­tur­al stud­ies and cul­tur­al his­to­ry has the sad sweet­ness, the  tristes tropiques,  that attends the simul­ta­ne­ous death and birth of cultures.

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