Introduction

Abstract

The papers in this issue developed out of presentations at the 2007 Digital Humanities Conference, at the University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana. A conference issue is a regular feature of Literary and Linguistic Computing, but this issue is a first, of sorts, since the articles it includes were chosen in a kind of plebiscite. Immediately after the conference concluded, we used the online conference registration and management system (Conftool, developed by Harald Weinrich) to email all conference participants and ask them what they thought were the best, most interesting papers they had heard. Their nominations guided the editors of this issue (the program chair, Ray Siemens, and the local host, John Unsworth) in selecting and assembling this issue. Indeed, it is evidence of the confluence of ideas in our community that these nominations produced a collection of articles that is so thematically unified. In ‘Thinking about Interpretation', John Bradley discusses his work to build tools that extend the ability of scholars in the humanities to do what they really want to do, namely ‘study texts by reading them' (quoting Claire Warwick from the Companion to Digital Humanities). Bradley's software package, called Pliny, is a tool of this sort, ‘named after the classical author Pliny the Elder who was well known in his own day as someone who was constantly writing notes about things he was interested in.' Pliny, the software, assumes that you might want to annotate and think about any kind of digital object—an image, a web page, a text file, an audio file, etc. It also supports interpretation, as a kind of emergent structure, by allowing arrangement, naming, grouping, and typed reference.