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Quote :"What is Humanities Computing and What is Not?" (Quote 1)
One of the many things you can do with computers is something that I would call humanities computing, in which the computer is used as tool for modelling humanities data and our understanding of it, and that activity is entirely distinct from using the computer when it models the typewriter, or the telephone, or the phonograph, or any of the many other things it can do.
You can do two types of things with a computer. Sure, you can use it do things like Skype with your grandma, or write an English essay, or listen to your music collection.
But you can also use a computer to help you understand data better—and here we're talking about humanities data specifically.
Let's say that you're writing an essay on children in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. You've got the book in digital form, and you do a search for the word "child" or "children" in the text, just to see how many times the word comes up. This type of activity is completely different from using the computer to Skype with grandma; it involves using the computer to conduct research. When you use the computer to conduct research in this way, you're doing "humanities computing." Yup, it can be as easy as that.
Unsworth is drawing a really important distinction here. He's pointing out that we can use computers in simple ways (turning on Skype, listening to music, etc.) and complex ways (to do research). It's only when we are using computers to do research that we are engaging in "humanities computing," the other popular term for "Digital Humanities."
Quote :"What is Humanities Computing and What is Not?" (Quote 2)
We are by now well into a phase of civilization when the terrain to be mapped, explored, and annexed is information space, and what's mapped is not continents, regions, or acres but disciplines, ontologies, and concepts. We need representations in order to navigate this new world, and those representations need to be computable, because the computer mediates our access to this world, and those representations need to be produced at first-hand, by someone who knows the terrain.
Five hundred years ago, the big quest was to explore and map out the rest of the world.
At this point, we know pretty much every corner of the globe. But what we're just beginning to explore and discover is "information space." That's all that virtual space that we access through a computer. There are all kinds of new, cool things to be discovered there that we are just beginning to understand.
How can we discover all that information? Well, through information technology, naturally—you know, computers. We can only discover and map this world through computers because it's only through computers that we have access to this "information space" in the first place.
Unsworth is emphasizing that computers and information technology represent the new frontier. For him, the job of Digital Humanists is to map and explore this new frontier—just like all those explorers who sailed around the globe and mapped out the physical world.