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By Dr. Shrout

Now that all of the first blog posts have come in, I’m going to do the first of many commentary posts. Mostly I’ll be pulling out interesting quotations from what you’ve written, and trying to tie the posts together somehow.

Avery raises an interesting point when she notes that “Moore was literate because her particular societal position granted her access to education, but Moore’s book does not exist only because she was literate. Moore produced the book, a cultural artefact, because of her personal “commitment to writing.”” This is important because, as (digital) historians, we have to remember to balance contingency with structure – that is, and as Eleanor also points out – Moore’s life was conditioned by her class status (structure) and gender (also structure) as well as by her own desire to write. Avery does a great job of balancing the credit we give to Moore for being an author and aggregator, and the larger structural forces that made her actions possible.

Avery also raised a fair critique of Wulf, when she noted that (for her) Wulf had failed to make the case that Moore was representative of Quaker culture. As we go forward, we’ll try to flag these moments of discomfort with historical argument, as well as what specifically was lacking.

Eleanor also noted the similarities between the kind of work done in commonplace books and that done in blogs, while Aidan (with an excellentally punny title) compares commonplace books to wikipedia. Alec, on the other hand, moves to Pinterest for his comparisons, contending that the creator of an object (digital or otherwise) has special access to the meaning of the material they collect, create and share.

This point links nicely with one made by Matt, that digital humanities make the world more accessible. Just as Moore’s book shared information that she read beyond her and among her circle of friends, so to do digital humanities projects share information beyond the original creator.

Kurt and Cordelia helpfully sums up the state of the field – noting that there is much disagreement about the meaning of digital humanities, but notes future promise.