Introduction  (Page 2/4)

Because of their vocational mission, humanist scholars register this crisis with special acuity: hence the content-focus of the conference on literary and cultural studies, history, classics, anthropology, archaeology, and music. We intended to include a unit on art and art history but circumstances intervened to prevent this from happening.

But these disciplines carry out their work in a complex institutional network that impinges upon and shapes all of it. Consequently, a searching inquiry into the future of humanities scholarship and education requires another set of multiple perspectives—specifically, the views of persons and initiatives that come from funding agencies, publishers, museums, libraries, and professional organizations: hence the need to hear from these other, crucial areas of our implicate order.

The conference title is lifted from H. G. Wells’s once-celebrated futurist chronicle The Shape of Things to Come (1933). The book made some remarkably accurate forecasts, the most arresting of which was its prediction that World War II would break out in Poland in 1940. Its longer-range views have proven less reliable—which is exactly why we should remember it today as we try to see beyond our immediate scholarly purview. If prophetic forecasting is hazardous, judicious planning is not—indeed, it’s imperative.

The Shape of Things to Come in humanities scholarship is in certain respects pretty clear. One’s lips don’t need the touch of a burning coal to see that our peer-reviewed scholarly exchanges will soon be largely digital and online, with print output options. Or that editorial theory and method will be a dominant scholarly pursuit for years to come: a subject of interest, a set of methodological procedures, a theoretical horizon. Or that integrating our cultural resources for scholarly study and public education—traditional as well as digital resources—will be the framework that guides much of our work.

But then what?

Conferences like this often seek to answer that question by laying down a set of conference “Outcomes.” But Wells’s book, as well as the current state of humanities scholarship, should make us wary of giving directions or offering prescriptions. And a conference remark by Susan Schreibman explains why : “I can’t tell you what I’m doing because I haven’t figured it out yet.”

All of us surely understand the force of that assessment of our work. But let’s not misunderstand its honesty. We may all be out far and in deep, but we’re not—certainly Susan Schreibman is not—entirely lost. As the poet said, we “learn by going where we have to go.” Or as Beth Nowviskie observed during the conference: “Love will find a way.” These papers and the conference discussions, all of which are now freely available online, lie along that way, which is a lot more energetic and thoughtful because it runs through digital spaces. As the real-time discussions were proceeding at the conference, a lively meta-twitter-conference was unfolding in the viral world, commenting on the proceedings from yet another real-time (real-time turning out to be virtual time at several dimensions?). Well, I thought: “Now there’s an Outcome of some consequence.”