In June I blogged John Nerbonne’s plenary at the ACH (See Nerbonne Plenary.) He has put up the text of the talk on his web site, Papers (Preprint Versions) by John Nerbonne. See The Data Deluge. John makes a balanced, open and fair argument for starting with humanities questions and focusing on delivering results. He is open to the way the questions evolve when using computing, so his practice is not uninterested in new questions as long as they evolve from existing ones. The end of the essay reflects on the discipline of humanities computing and Willard McCarthy’s discussion of it. Where I differ is that I see an emerging set of questions around new media which we can also address and produce results. The “we” includes the arts – fields that have been transformed by computing differently. The results also differ when one is less of a science and more of an art – in fact there are few results in the form of answers – only interventions and exhibits. But, credible and responsive work whether you call it results or interventions, are still what keeps a field healthy and allows new questions to emerge. There is nothing worse than a field that just complains about being taken seriously without producing anything of interest outside its complaints.
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