Getting there from here : remembering the future of digital humanities : Roberto Busa Award lecture 2013

The text which follows was written as a lecture for a specific audience on a unique occasion, in a social setting that is now irretrievably gone. This setting allowed freedoms that are apt to seem out of place in the present context. But I exercised them for a reason which survives: in the spirit of Bruno Latour's advice in 'The Politics of Explanation', to foreground the struggle of making an argument rather than to give an impression of having captured some truth or other (1988: 162-3). On behalf of digital humanities I wanted to foreground the poverty of language (some would say of theory, others of criticism) that for most if not all of its history has made this struggle so difficult. As Clifford Geertz said on behalf of anthropology, 'We are reduced to insinuating theories because we lack the power to state them' (1973: 24). Whether my suggestion of a language gains purchase among those for whom the lecture was written remains to be seen. I do not insist on it as the sole possibility or even the best. But I do insist that this poverty of language should rank first among items on the agenda to be addressed and that its solution is to be found by putting the field into its historical context.