Digital rhetoric, literae humaniores and Leibniz’s dream

Abstract

This essay celebrates the beginning of Digital Enlightenment Studies by raising some basic questions that are still uncomfortably incunabular. (See Jerome McGann on that, below.) The central question I pose is this: what are the consequences of applying digital methods to scholarly editing and how best might we think about them? It is an essay by an outsider intended for a scholarly commune of knowledgeable practitioners in the application of these methods. Whatever value the essay has comes from placing those methods in the broader context of digital humanities historically and philosophically considered. It starts with some of the earliest explorations of devices ‘to think with’, as Ivor Richards said of the codex; considers their fundamental role as modelling machines; takes up the first attempt to design the quasi-cognitive processes of digital computing; uses the author’s own fledgling project for a glimpse of how different these processes must be from our own; and finally ends with an example of their potential for propelling imaginative thought. Throughout are provocations to do something about the disciplinary amnesia of digital humanities, to see that it becomes of the humanities rather than merely in them.