Enfilade

In yesterday’s NY Times, Patricia Cohen addresses the rise of digital research tools, including Mapping the Republic of Letters:

Patricia Cohen, “Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches,” The New York Times (16 November 2010)

A history of the humanities in the 20th century could be chronicled in “isms” — formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism — grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature, politics and culture spread. The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data.

Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have. . . .

Last year the National Endowment for the Humanities spent $2 million on digital projects. One of the endowment’s grantees is Dan Edelstein, an associate professor of French and Italian at Stanford University who is charting the flow of ideas during the Enlightenment. The era’s great thinkers — Locke, Newton, Voltaire — exchanged tens of thousands of letters; Voltaire alone wrote more than 18,000. . . .

The full article is available here»