Introduction  (Page 4/4)

Of special relevance here is the question of interface design. Digital scholars too regularly and too easily draw a distinction between their “data” and their delivery interfaces. That distinction too easily and too often leads to arguments about the primary value of the data, as if it could be separated from the more ephemeral interfaces. But the distinction is seriously misleading. There can be no data without structure, and all structure is interface, whether we view it as a screen appearance or not. Indeed, most interfaces are logical and algorithmic, perceptually invisible. Even more importantly, all interfaces—visible as well as invisible—are interpretational forms. Until online scholars are prepared to elucidate the critical and interpretive functions of that work—until we explain why we are doing innovative kinds of scholarship and not simply constructing websites—the general community of humanists will continue to stand aside.

Allison Muri has rightly said that “a project is never done.” But since each of us one of these days will certainly be done for , as Peter Robinson observed with his familiar Aussie wit, our work must be sustained by others. That elementary fact explains why the future of scholarship and public education cannot tolerate disengaged humanist communities. We can’t do this work ourselves.

“Do the arithmetic.” Librarians, funders, publishers use that phrase all the time. Scholars tend not to. But we all need to do the arithmetic. And the metrics in the phrase aren’t just financial, no matter what some business managers may believe and argue. If you “do the arithmetic” you’ll soon figure out that you’re trying to solve a problem of large (human) numbers and complex (social) variables.

A recent issue of Critical Inquiry edited by James Chandler and Arnold Davidson has two essays of special relevance to this conference. The Fate of Disciplines , Critical Inquiry 35.4 (Summer 2009). Sheldon Pollock tells us that “the core problem of philology today. . .is whether it will survive” (931) and he goes on to explain why this is something we should all be worried about: “whether coming generations will even be able to read the texts of their traditions is now all too real a question” (935). For a parallel if alternative view of the discipline of philology, see my McKenzie Lecture, “Philology in a New Key” (Oxford, February 2009; reprinted in somewhat abbreviated form as “Our Textual History” in Times Literary Supplement 5564 (20 November 2009): 13-15). Pollock gives special attention to our great Sanskrit inheritance, but his concern (for example) with “the shallow presentism of scholarship” in general (935) underscores the breadth of the problem as he sees it. It also indicates the peril to knowledge and education that has come with the turn to “bottom-line calculation” (935) in university policy everywhere.

Doing the arithmetic of knowledge in “bottom-line” terms is the subject of Marshall Sahlins’ essay—an extensive, alternately dismal and witty exposure of how this kind of thinking infects the university tout court . The narrative is all the more trenchant for those moments when Sahlins lets us glimpse his own moments of complicity.

God, or Somebody, knows that capitalist enterprise has much to answer for. But so far as sustaining our cultural inheritance is concerned, its demons need not be enemies of promise. Successful business plans make both short- and long-term calculations. The business of the university is knowledge and education, both of which have always been long-term capital investments. As Roger Bagnall remarks, if Papyrology is unlikely to generate the revenue needed to sustain its work, then universities have to think outside that box called “the bottom line.” How else can we expect to understand the ancient world without it? And how can we understand who and where we are now without those histories?

We are part of a vast implicate order. And because that is the case, we need an arithmetic adequate to that order. Sustaining humanities scholarship into the future, which is also keeping faith with the past, means one simple and obvious, if also difficult, thing: it means cooperation among the stakeholders. In this case, the central position of the universities lays a special obligation on them: not only to generate the funds needed to maintain what the past has entrusted to them, but to set policies that drive inter-institutional scholarly collaborations. There are economies of scale, as we all—theoretically—understand. But the truth is that most humanists, abetted by their universities, continue to operate not in an implicate but in an isolate order, as the author lines of our publications indicate, all the while pledging allegiance to “globalization” and “the noble living and the noble dead.”

Online networks—both their character and their costs—are calling us to rethink what we’re doing to reshape our common and communal procedures. The question, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick asks in her polemical inquiry into online scholarship, do “we have the institutional will to commit to the development of the [digital] systems” that will replace the “entrenched systems that no longer serve our needs”. See the text of Planned Obsolescence online at media commons press : (External Link) The question asks for practical responses.

Jerome McGann