A telescope for the mind?

The phrase in my title is Margaret Masterman’s; the question mark is mine. Writing in 1962 for Freeing the Mind, a series in the Times Literary Supplement, she used the phrase to suggest computing’s potential to transform our conception of the human world just as in the seventeenth century the optical telescope set in motion a fundamental rethink of our relation to the physical one. The question mark denotes my own and others’ anxious interrogation of research in the digital humanities for signs that her vision, or something like it, is being realized or that demonstrable progress has been made. This interrogation is actually nothing new; it began in the professional literature during the 1960s and then became a sporadic feature of our discourse that persists to this day. I will return to present worries shortly. First allow me to rehearse a few of its early expressions. Then, following the clues these yield, I will turn to the debate that I am not at all sure we are having but which, if we did, could translate the neurotic search for justification into questions worth asking. The debate I think we should be having is, to provoke it with a question. What is this machine of ours for? Or to make it personal, What are we for?