The Vision of Tnugdal (1149) was written in Latin in Regensburg. It provides a case study for the genre of otherworld visions. The author, an Irish monk, shows the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, in his treatment of divine mercy and justice as expounded by a guide who accompanies the visionary and explains the nature of the otherworld. Hell is segmented into eight locations for different punishments. The less grievous sinners, still redeemable, are at the top, with those eternally damned already in the pit of hell. Outside a segmented heaven two intermediate locations are designated for those neither particularly good nor particularly bad. This lengthy and popular work demonstrates considerable learning and a unique creativity with its vivid descriptions of punishments and demons and its spatial, intellectual, and spiritual vision of heaven. The vision expounds a theology of fear while extoling the redemptive power of both internal and external pilgrimage.

When Dante began writing his Commedia around 1306, European literature was rich with works that provided a fertile ground for constructing his account of a journey in the otherworld. The two closely related genres – voyage and vision – were integral aspects of this literary domain. While the distinction between these two venerable forms should be quite clear to the modern reader, in the Middle Ages voyage literature could often be as hypothetical as vision literature. Both shared a common projection of the hero into the unknown – an experience that often engendered a crisis, resulting in the opportunity for the hero's personal conversion based on accumulated experience, knowledge, and insight. Epic stories from the classical period often combined voyage and vision. Heroes like Odysseus and Aeneas wandered a Mediterranean both real and imaginary, and both visited the underworld in tales that are mirrored in quite a significant body of medieval vision literature, including especially the Commedia. Despite their commonalities, it is best to consider these genres of voyage and vision separately to appreciate fully their vitality and complexity at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

Let us begin with the voyage. Although the great age of discovery was still two centuries in the future, fourteenth-century Europe was not without an interest in the outside world, in travel and adventure, in foreign lands and peoples. Although real travel was circumscribed for most medieval people, many accounts were careful records of actual journeys. Travellers embarked on journeys for much the same reasons as they have always done. The first reason would have been intellectual, motivated by curiosity and a quest for knowledge about the surrounding world. The second would have been personal – the journey taken in search of self-transformation. Under this rubric would be counted both pilgrimage and adventure, including crusade, which had aspects of both military adventure and spiritual pilgrimage. The third would have been pragmatic, pursuing trade, diplomacy, or patronage in distant lands. Often travellers' accounts reveal a combination of motivations, and sometimes no clear motivation at all.

Yet many travel accounts relied on imagination and fantasy. Imaginary worlds were created on top of the real world as background and setting for heroic tales. The origins for this practice date back as far as the epic of Gilgamesh (eighteenth century BCE).

There are many issues surrounding the digital humanities that are beyond the question of the scholarship itself and its contribution to either the individual disciplines or to useful knowledge generally. While humanists outside academia need to be less concerned with many of these issues, academics must be acutely aware of them for their own success and the success of their work. In this chapter we will discuss the education of the digital humanist; stratification; collaboration; publication, distribution, discoverability; preservation; reader and author; funding strategies; sustainability; HTP (hiring, tenure and promotion) issues; gender, global and other divides; and digital theory. In Chapter 9 we will examine copyright and other rights, DRM (digital rights management) and open access.

EDUCATION

One of the chief hallmarks of the first Renaissance humanists was their insistence upon a new style of education that would reform the methods of the medieval schoolmen in the universities and transform individuals through a knowledge of past models and of the skills needed to communicate this knowledge for the present. While humanists eventually found their place within the university and derived their name, humanista, from the studia humanitatis that they taught – largely the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy and poetry (including history writing): what today would cover most humanities faculties – the impact of Renaissance humanism went well beyond academic disciplines. Pier Paolo Vergerio, Leonardo Bruni, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Battista Guarino, Baldassare Castiglione, Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives all produced treatises on education for Europe's lay elites. These works covered education both in formal terms and in subject matter – history and ethical education, for example – and for day-to-day life, in practical matters of courtesy and behavior – everything from life at court to table manners to the martial arts. The education of a Christian prince and of young men and women became hallmarks of a humanist approach intended to be comprehensive and thorough, translating the virtues of the past for the present.

INTRODUCTION

With the advent of digital scholarship, humanists are increasingly using both traditional materials and those previously considered outside the parameters of their disciplines. This brings with it an opportunity for richer and more collaborative types of scholarship. By describing the variety of elements that one can incorporate into digital research, the following two chapters hope to explore the scope and boundaries of traditional disciplinary considerations. Our discussions will also link these elements with tools that incorporate this material into digital scholarship.

HUMANITIES DATA

At this point, it is important to reiterate one of our initial distinctions: while physical scientists draw their data from the natural world and social scientists from human groupings, humanists draw their information from the world created by humans: most concretely from historically created objects, but also from the record of human discourse either about that record or about human discourse itself. Thus humanities data might be about the record of events – what we commonly call facts – or about the texts created about them, whether these texts are written, oral, visual, aural or spatial. Humanists have therefore tended to talk more about texts or cultural and artistic objects; but now under the impact of the digital, a certain leveling of language tends to group all these under the rubric of “data.”

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines data as “factual information (as measurements or statistics) used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation.” More broadly, however, data can be the individual fact or event, statistics drawn from data points or other items of information: visual, aural or physical evidence amenable to collection, analysis and exposition. While we tend to think of “data” in terms of the physical and social sciences, humanities scholars also work with data, most often with reference to the first two functions of the above definition: reasoning and discussion. While humanities data might not always be as succinct and number friendly as the data of the sciences, often it can be just that.

INTRODUCTION

Humanists study the world created by humanity. Based on considerable research, and with specific questions in mind, they define a corpus of material for investigation – their evidence – whether it is the compositions of Mozart or the paintings of Michelangelo, the buildings of Frank Gehry or the voting records of the Venetian Senate, the cuneiform tablets of the ancient Near East, the land grants of the American West, the life and thought of a fourteenth-century queen or of a twentieth-century philosopher. This evidence can include text, document, object, space, performance, artifact or construct (including games, simulations and virtual worlds).

Because so many who are involved in the administration of colleges and universities may not come from a humanist background, misunderstanding, misconception and underappreciation of the work done by humanists can be found even within academia. Administrators are far more likely to understand how scientists and social scientists work. From biology – the study of life and living organisms (including humans) – to physics – the study of matter and its motion through space and time – researchers in the physical and life sciences attempt to understand the material world using the “scientific method,” or inquiry based on empirical and measurable evidence gathered through observation and experimentation and subject to specific principles of reasoning and critique. However, from physicists to mathematicians, scientists also employ theoretical models in their work and combine theoretical with empirical approaches.

The social sciences, which include a wide range of disciplines from anthropology and economics to political science and sociology, use the empirical methods of their counterparts in the sciences when collecting data on society and social groups, then process that data quantitatively to better understand how these groups function. Social science can also be interpretative and qualitative rather than quantitative, employing theories of social critique or symbolic interpretation, for example.

Once a digital publication is ready for release, what issues surround it and how do they affect reception and use? What are the mechanisms in place for prepublication and postpublication peer review of digital projects? How are digital projects used by other scholars? What are the various and possible criteria for evaluating digital scholarship? Do digital projects count? For what and to whom? Must digital projects be scalable and replicable? Should they be interoperable with other scholarship? How is a project connected to the humanities community through the digital tools that the community uses: forums, blogs, wikis, listservs and so forth?

The meaning of publication and its forms have changed considerably over the past five hundred years and continue to do so. In the two hundred years that separate Petrarch and his first conscious attempts to define a new humanist movement and Desiderius Erasmus, who took full advantage of the new technology of the printing press, most humanists chose to publish in a few set forms. These ranged from the letter, closely modeled on classical examples most especially those of Cicero, where the communication sent from one scholar to another was both a private and a very public matter; to the edition of classical texts (secular and religious) culled from manuscripts in monastic and princely libraries; to the treatise – whether on education and manners, arms or architecture. Great works of history based on classical forms raised Renaissance historiography from the chronicle and its sequential recording of events to new thematic and interpretative formulations. By that time, Erasmus, Thomas More and other Renaissance humanists were writing for a print audience, and they had amplified these forms to include more popular alternatives, including the dialog, satire and essay. In the hands of writers like Erasmus and Montaigne, the essay became one of the chief media of political, religious and philosophical thought.

In the Werner Herzog film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, investigators examine the cave of Chauvet in southern France where they discovered what proved to be the oldest cave art known, dating from thirty-two thousand years ago. The cave's mouth had been closed by a landslide about twenty thousand years ago; and so the exquisite paintings of horses, rhinos, ibex, bison, mastodons, lions and bears remained pristine through the millennia. The cave was closed to the public immediately so that scientific analysis by archaeologists, paleontologists, art historians and computer scientists could begin. A detailed three-dimensional digital map covering every point of the cave was created and has become the standard reference point for all further investigators. Radio carbon analysis traced various painting campaigns over the cave's long use, and very careful, if old-fashioned, visual analysis also identified one of the cave's painters: the six-foot-tall, probable male with the crooked pinky finger who left his positive hand prints throughout the cave's chambers.

One of the most intriguing sequences in the film was the brief discussion of how one set of paintings was revisited and overdrawn with another set of images that enhanced the first. This second painter used the same techniques, at the same spot – but five thousand years later. The brief mention was astounding: what kind of cultural memory would have to be enshrined in physical retracing, mapping, secret sharing, ritual initiation, artistic tradition, song, dance or other cultural referents so that one could retrace the steps of long-dead ancestors during a time when most life spans must have been little more than a single human generation? We know that Australian Aboriginals have handed down similar memories and artistic traditions, and we do have some idea of the methods by which such deep cultural memory is transmitted in both spiritual and physical memory.

COPYRIGHT AND OTHER RIGHTS

The practice of a writer or artist laying claim to his or her own work is an ancient one in the West and goes beyond the limitations of literacy into textual communities that included both oral and written transmission. By 500 BCE, for example, chefs in the Greek city of Sybaris in Calabria were granted year-long monopolies on their culinary creations. The authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey was long attributed to Homer even before they were transcribed into writing. In ancient Rome writers like Cicero would have their own literate slaves, or would rely on those of friends, to produce multiple copies of their works to be distributed among their textual community. The accuracy and authenticity of their texts would be guaranteed by their authors' direct supervision of this process. Writers like Virgil and Horace became celebrated writers in their own lifetimes, and the Roman poet Martial complained of piracy of his works when they were recited without attribution. By the late eleventh century in the medieval West, the oral traditions of the chansons de geste were slowly taking on ascribed authorship as various versions became recognized. Under the late medieval patronage system, the dedication of an author's book to a wealthy patron not only guaranteed some form of income or social promotion but also acted as a means of informal princely protection for authorship.

During the Renaissance the first Florentine law that can be characterized as patent or copyright was granted to the architect Filippo Brunelleschi in June 1421. It is probably no coincidence that the first satire of this concept was Antonio Manetti's fictional tale, The Fat Woodworker (c. 1450). Manetti relates how – in revenge for a social slight – the craftsman in question is duped in a practical joke by Brunelleschi and his friends into believing that he longer existed, but that he was actually someone else, a copy of himself.

INTRODUCTION

On the most basic level, the tools of the humanist have been standard and unchanging since the fourteenth century: the liberal arts of rhetoric (we still say rhetorical “device” in referring to some of these tools) and grammar whereby the humanist constructed texts and presented them in books, speeches and letters. These have evolved and expanded into the essential philological tools that most humanist scholars continue to use. Next come material tools, including the pen, ink, sheet of paper or parchment and the codex. At the next level, these might include the nearly uniform elements of the humanist's study so often depicted in Renaissance paintings, as for example in Ghirlandaio or Van Eyck's portraits of St. Jerome in his study: a walled-off space, writing and reading table, storage structure for research materials and a private collection of books, letters and visual materials; and musical, calculation or other instruments. In the case of Antonello da Messina (see Figure 7) this expands out in a grand contextualization of the scholar within a far broader environment: St. Jerome set amid the sacred space of the Church. Finally we might also think of tools as the public aggregations that humanists use: the archive or library, the collection of objects, whether in a cabinet of curiosities or a gallery of drawings, prints, paintings or sculpture. As a physical extension of the letter and of the study, humanist scholars have also convened in classrooms, symposia, lectures, seminars and conferences for centuries. Used consciously for pedagogy or modes of scholarly communication these too might be considered tools. In short, all these provide the immaterial, performative and material bases for humanistic work.

At the same time, everything from the scholar's desk and shelves, study, studio, rehearsal and performance space, lecture halls, campuses, research institutes and convention halls can also legitimately be considered environments. Only most recently with the digital has this kit of tools begun to change rapidly and fundamentally.

INTRODUCTION

In our previous chapter on tools we made note of the traditional setting of humanistic work: the private study and the public library, archive, classroom and the meeting space. In that regard our discussion of tools overlaps with that of space and environments. For in the digital age the desktop computer plays a highly volatile and multipolar role: it is the passive tablet or manuscript upon which we write and keep our records; but it is also a window upon a vast world made accessible by the Internet or recreated through the wide array of digital programs now at the humanist's disposal. In this regard it is therefore far more like a work environment. At which point did the function of the Renaissance scholar's pen, desk, shelf, specimen jars and other accessories cease to function as tools and at which did they become an environment? The example that we presented in Chapter 5 (see Figure 7), illustrates this sense of the individual scholar set within a broad social and intellectual context. When do our other tools become such environments as well? Corbusier had famously declared – and carried out in his architecture – the principle that “the house is a machine for living.” Over the past century the American driver has turned the automobile from a simple tool of travel, a machine on wheels, into a built environment, an extension of the driver's personality, social status, material success and sense of personal space and security. It is the most familiar and highly cherished environment in which Americans still live.

The computer and its associated applications and networks, whether local or global, can also be viewed as both tool and environment. With 3D imaging and virtual realities our tools have also become our environments and vice versa.

As we have stressed throughout this book, most humanists continue to use a limited tool kit of digital tools for most work in their disciplines and research agendas. As the corpus of digital work grows and potential and expectations begin to evolve, the importance of many of the tools in this section will become increasingly acknowledged. The following list is not meant to be complete or exhaustive and does not imply any recommendation on the part of the authors. However, it is a detailed sampling of what was available and supported at the time of writing. In terms of testing, in most cases we have verified only that the websites were still functioning and the products still available. The descriptions are taken from the product information available online. DiRT (digital research tools), TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) have been major resources used to identify these tools. While most tools listed have been put into single categories, many perform multiple functions in addition to the one assigned here.

1. 3D MODELING AND PRINTING

3DCrafter ( http://amabilis.com/products ) is a real-time 3D modeling and animation tool that incorporates an intuitive drag-and-drop approach to 3D modeling.

After Effects ( http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects.html ) is digital motion graphics and compositing software from Adobe that allows users to animate, alter and composite media in 2D and 3D space with various built-in tools and third-party plug-ins.

Amira ( http://www.vsg3d.com/amira/overview ) is a multifaceted tool that allows for integration, manipulation and visualization of large sets of data. Automatic and interactive segmentation tools support processing of 3D image data.

INTRODUCTION

Every landscape has two aspects to it: the perspective and other external points of view and the view obtained by the human agent moving in and through it. “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better, endow it with value.” With the new insights garnered from landscape studies and humanists' embrace of such fields as rural archaeology, we have begun to realize more fully and to understand better the human impact upon landscapes: everything from agriculture to the clearance of rivers and swamps and forests to massive land moving. Simon Schama's classic Landscape and Memory is one example of how literary and historical studies have traced the changing understanding of the landscape – from ancient and medieval awe to Romantic idealization to industrial utilitarianism. Such new studies have provided deep insights into how we understand the world around us – the world through which we move and in which we work and live.

In the same way, throughout this book we have described the impact of the digital upon the humanities and how it has changed many aspects of research and disciplinary thought; but in this chapter we will first briefly discuss the impact of humanists as agents upon the world of computing. We began our discussion with Roberto Busa's request to Thomas Watson for help in building a search engine for the massive corpus of Thomas Aquinas 's works. That collaboration remains paradigmatic of the way in which humanists have approached the world of the computer in its first stages.

The library world had been working for years on various computer solutions to issues raised by humanities research questions: cataloging, word and metadata searches, sorts and report formats. At the universities of Michigan, California and Virginia, for example, library and computing departments have set up various offices to accommodate the humanists’ research agendas, and we have reviewed these in detail in many places throughout this book.

DEFINITIONS

What are the “digital humanities”? Ask a physicist to define gravity, and she will most likely first reply with a brief textual description about forces and masses in the universe and then present a formula. Ask an economist to define poverty, and he might refer you to the U.S. Census Bureau's lists of scales, rates and other metrics. But ask a humanist to define peace, and she will turn first to the dictionary and then to a brief historical survey of how the word evolved, from what languages and therefore from what historical contexts and developments. She might then proceed to construct a narrative based on available written records. She would do these two things because the humanist, unlike the physical or social scientist, deals not with the objects and forces of the natural world or with large abstractions like social groups and economic trends but with language, its origins, constructions, development and perception over time. The very core of humanistic study is to seek out origins and to interpret how we use language – including the language of the visual arts, music and architecture – to understand the world that humans have created. All humanistic study begins and ends with language, its meaning and its ability to bring the past alive.

How then do we understand the digital humanities – a term widely used in administrative, scholarly, library and information technology (IT) circles but rarely defined in any specific way? What exactly do these partners – the digital and the humanities – have to do with one another? Many people look at the marriage and come away with very different impressions, all from their own perspectives. One can analyze the term's exact meanings from several different points of view, conditioned by historical and contemporary thinking and practice.