Tree, Turf, Centre, Archipelago—or Wild Acre? Metaphors and Stories for Humanities Computing121 For Sinéad O'Sullivan.2 This essay was originally delivered as a plenary address at ‘Computing Arts 2004’, Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing, University of Newcastle, NSW Australia, www.newcastle.edu.au/centre/cllc/ca2004/. My thanks to the organizer, Professor Hugh Craig, for his many kindnesses and patience, to the anonymous reviewers who stimulated me to improve the first attempt and to John Burrows for advice on the connotations of words. All URLs have been verified as of 29 July 2005.

Abstract

The social acceptability of computing to the humanities is no longer a serious problem, although its role in research is sometimes overlooked or must be kept decorously out of sight. The real problem is that in an academic world largely defined by disciplinary turf-polity, possibilities for it are severely constricted. As was true in the early days of computer science, humanities computing is still likely to be seen, judged and funded not as an integral practice but piecemeal, in the widely differing terms of the disciplines to which it is applied. In this essay, I go after antiquated figures of thought responsible for this blinkered, piecemeal view. Reasoning from the evident importance of geopolitical metaphors to our operative conception of disciplinarity, I look down under, and back in time, for different, less constricting metaphors and draw out of them a different professional myth to live by.