RLI 284 An Overview of the Digital Humanities 9 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC 2013 28 Third, there is also an increasing need for certain kinds of tools or infrastructure that span the three areas. These include tools that support the basic scholarly process of annotation. Across all these areas the identification of named entities, such as people, organizations, and places is an important objective. The development of online databases of personal names (including prosopographies) and place names (such as gazetteers) will require continued support. Fourth, investments in tools for textual analysis are now well advanced. While new understandings continue to be achieved, there is a growing imperative for the immediate future to concentrate more fully on tools that facilitate visual and spatial analysis, and to investigate audio and other areas that are emergent and do not fall in the three broad areas that have developed historically. Fifth, a high priority remains to understand the requirements for publishing and curating scholarly products in these areas and building the necessary capacities in cultural and academic organizations for these functions. Finally, the training of scholars and students to understand and engage imaginatively in tool-based modes of intellectual pursuits is a further imperative. Fellowships of various kinds are an important vehicle. But we must also think broadly about curricular interventions, for it is only when the tools and processes for answering “why possible?” questions are reliable enough to be introduced to and used productively by scores of students at once that the digital humanities could be said to have reached maturity. Acknowledgements I thank my colleagues, Helen Cullyer and Kristen Van Leuven, for their careful reading of earlier versions of this essay and for their multiple suggestions to improve it. Endnotes 1 Ammon Shea, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages (New York: Perigee Books, 2008) Nicholson Baker, “From A to Zyxt,” New York Times, August 3, 2008, http://www.nytimes. com/2008/08/03/books/review/Baker-t.html. 2 TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research), “How Do You Define Humanities Computing / Digital Humanities?,” TAPoR wiki, University of Alberta, 2011, http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index. php/How_do_you_define_Humanities_Computing_/_Digital_Humanities%3F centerNet, “How Do You Define DH?,” Day of DH 2012, University of Alberta, 2012, http://dayofdh2012.artsrn. ualberta.ca/dh/ centerNet, “How Do You Define DH?,” Day of DH 2013, Michigan State University, 2013, http://dayofdh2013.matrix.msu.edu/members/. 3 Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_ Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 122. 4 Ibid., 30–71. 5 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference,”
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