Digital Humanities 3.0: Where We Have Come From and Where We Are Now?

I want to ask the related questions of where we are and where we are headed in the digital humanities. Since I am an historian, I approach these questions by asking where we have been and how we got here. Digital Humanities 1.0 was the use of information technology and computing to produce forms of scholarship that literally could not be done in the analog age: the encoding of text (TEI), computational linguistics and the creation of humanities databases (Perseus) were the two most prominent examples. DH 2.0 was the era inaugurated by IATH and scholars such as Jerry McGann, Ed Ayers and others in reconceptualizing traditional humanities questions through the intellectual power of technology — relating text to image, creating complexly interrelated databases, use of large-scale digitization. DH 3.0 is where I hope we are, searching for a new order of technical possibilities that will change modes of thought. DH 3.0 assumes the technology and moves on to give primary consideration to intellectual problems that were inconceivable in either the analog or early digital eras. The challenge is no longer either the usage of technology or the linking of technology to more or less traditional humanities problems, but reconceptualizing the problems. But of course all of this assumes what is not true — that we put a digital humanities infrastructure into place.