THE HISTORY OF THE FOUNDING AND DEVELOPMENT OF IATH

A] Centered in research projects of the faculty and students

B] Organized outside the traditional departmental structure of the university

C] Collaborative and trans-hierarchical

D] Integrally located in the library (ie, not dispersed across campus)

THESES ON HUMANITIES COMPUTING

1. The major problems facing humanities computing are not technical but institutional/political.

2. The technology will develop independently and stochastically. Humanities computing will affect that development much less than it will be shaped by it.

3. In the near term, the focus of programmatic work in humanities computing should be driven by the "content" and subjects/problems of traditional humanities scholarship and education.

4. In the near term, students coming out of such a program will be extremely attractive job

candidates in a variety of areas.

5. In the near term, successful work in humanities computing will be far more collaborative than is the case in traditional disciplines (ie, collaborative between different levels of the traditional academic hierarchy).

6. When computerized tools are integrated into the traditional areas of arts and sciences research, and in particular humanities research, one of two forking paths will be taken.

6a. "humanities computing" will become absorbed as a specialized subdiscipline (the analogy here is to textual studies);

6b. "Humanities computing" will grow to form the basis of a reorganized arts curriculum centered in language, media, and communication (ie., it will migrate toward the classical model of core education as an set of related instrumental (civic rather than monastic) disciplines (eg the ancient trivium, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic).

7. I will be dead when these things "come to pass" but some of you won't.

NOTES ON A PROGRAM AT UVA

-- Encourage as much play and experimentation in the regular course work as possible; reciprocally, require (as much as possible) that the final thesis project be a practical one (a tool or an organized research site or instrument).

-- Work in the interstices of the university structure but WITH that structure. So for an MA degree awarded in humanities computing "with a concentration in X", work out the possibility that with (say) another term of course work the person could get another MA in the discipline.