The Computational Turn: Thinking about the Digital Humanities 论文

摘要

Few dispute that digital technology is fundamentally changing the way in which we engage in the research process. Indeed, it is becoming more and more evident that research is increasingly being mediated through digital technology. Many argue that this mediation is slowly beginning to change what it means to undertake research, affecting both the epistemologies and ontologies that underlie a research programme. Of course, this development is variable depending on disciplines and research agendas, with some more reliant on digital technology than others, but it is rare to find an academic today who has had no access to digital technology as part of their research activity. Library catalogues are now probably the minimum way in which an academic can access books and research articles without the use of a computer, but, with card indexes dying a slow and certain death (Baker, 1996, 2001), there remain few outputs for the non-digital scholar to undertake research in the modern university. Email, Google searches and bibliographic databases are become increasingly crucial, as more of the world libraries are scanned and placed online. Whilst some decry the loss of the skills and techniques of older research traditions, others have warmly embraced what has come to be called the digital humanities (Schreibman et al., 2008; Schnapp & Presner, 2009; Presner, 2010; Hayles, 2011).