ABSTRACT
One of the most striking assertions of the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 is that “The digital is the realm of the … open source, open resources …. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy” (3; quotation modified). The Manifesto authors trace their assertion back to the “utopian core” of DH, arguing for a “genealogical descent from the counterculture-cyberculture intertwinglings of the 60s and 70s” (ibid.). “Intertwinglings” is a reference to Theodore H. Nelson’s Computer Lib/ Dream Machines, self-published in 1974, a text (really two books in one, or a doubled text: a computer manual and “dreams” or countercultural musings about computing) that quickly became famous among the fast-emerging computing communities around the world, and remains famous to this day, especially because of its prescient if not prophetic assertions about the future of computing. It could be argued that the DH Manifesto 2.0 authors are offering a competing originary narrative here, an alternative genealogy to that of the critics and historians who trace DH’s origins back to Father Busa’s Index Thomisticus, a massive project which was
initiated in 1949, “using IBM punch-cards (one of the earliest ways of storing machine readable data), was transferred on to magnetic tape (completed 1980), printed in hard-copy form (1974), and then transferred onto CD-ROM format (1992)” (Lane 2013, 726). Dean Irvine makes the insightful observation that tracing the origins of DH back to Busa is “anachronistic” because the earliest technologies Busa used were analogue and “mechanical,” not digital; further, Irvine sketches out the relationship between Busa and IBM (who provided the machines for his project) as an economic partnership, one which locked Busa in to IBM’s proprietary systems (2). As Irvine argues, “Once he [Busa] entered into this partnership, there was no economically feasible means of porting his proprietary data to another company’s processing machines. Like IBM’s business clients, Busa effectively entered into a licensing agreement, which guaranteed IBM recurrent – if unpredictable – returns on its investment” (ibid.). In relation to the DH Manifesto 2.0’s statements about open source, in this instance IBM should be “the enemy,” not the facilitator of a project that virtually all digital humanists trace their origins back to! Irvine, however, calls the agreement with IBM “a sustainable business model” (2), whereby IBM take on the role of Angel Investors (3), that is to say, they take risks in investing in a new start-up venture which may or may not be successful.
