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LATE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Matthew Arnold looked to France as a model for a salutary "Influence of Academies" on culture in general.1 Twenty-five years ago Arnold's academic inheritors appeared to be living the realization of his hope. But then came the crash. Humanities scholarship and education has been a holy mess for some time. Looking at the way we live now in the academy, one can hardly not recall Anthony Trollope's dark portrayal of The Way We Live Now. What's going on? Where are the snows of yesteryear?
Something like those very questions drove the editor of Critical Inquiry, W. J. T. Mitchell, to summon the journal's board of editors to a symposium in April 2003 "to discuss the future of the journal and of the interdisciplinary fields of criticism and theory" (324).2 Some of the most distinguished academics on this continent gathered in Chicago to assess "The Future of Criticism," and in particular of Critical Theory. I missed the Friday-night public forum and pep rally for the symposium but made it for the key event, the day-long Saturday discussions. From these I departed for home shocked and more than a little dismayed by what I learned.
Most of us registered, one way or another, the malaise that has grown widespread in the humanities, and I wasn't particularly disheartened that we were all uncertain about how best to deal with the problems we talked about. Something else was troubling, however: the degree of ignorance about information technology and its critical relevance to humanities education and scholarship. I've spent almost twenty years studying this subject in the only way that gives one a chance of mastering it. That is, by hands-on collaborative interdisciplinary work. By designing and building the tools and systems that alone will teach one what these tools are and what they might be, what they mean and what they might mean. You don't learn a language by talking about it or reading books. You learn it by speaking it and writing it. There's no other way. Anything less is just, well, theoretical.
So far as information technology concerns traditional humanities, the issues are more clearly understood in Europe than they are in the United States. Moreover, if you want to engage serious,...