Digital Humanities Quotes

We talked about the Internet and Wikipedia and how facts and history are being collectively created online.

What use could the humanities be in a digital age? University students focusing on the humanities may end up, at least in their parents' nightmares, as dog-walkers for those majoring in computer science. But, for me, the humanities are not only relevant but also give us a toolbox to think seriously about ourselves and the world.

I believe we should celebrate new possibilities of combining the printed codex with electronic technology... The information ecology is getting richer, not thinner.

In the digital future, texts will be annotated visually, animated and illustrated like never before. The austere 'prayer book' paper that permitted the space for Shepard's illustrations to Pepys' diaries is now being recreated in the digital era.

Frank Schirrmacher's passing is a great loss. Among the intellectuals, he, along with Friedrich Kittler, was the only one who understood the philosophical dimensions of the Internet.

As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007.

The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC.

I want to collect the entire range of scientific and educational literature and make it accessible to the whole world. Just like Google Books, but maybe in a more ambitious way.

I want to continue to strengthen Harvard's fabulous collections in old printed material, but at the same time, I want to help Harvard move into the world of digitized information.

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect.

My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.