To talk about computing in the humanities is a lot like discussing a dinner of steak and tofu. Electronic text centers more often than not are involved in housing images as well as textual information, and even the term information technology is suspect because the humanities seek to build knowledge, not merely collect and process information. But regardless of the name, we do know that computing's most exciting gift has been the birth of new communications technologies and their ability to open undreamed-of opportunities for extending the humanities knowledge base.
Humanists build their work on material that transcends the boundaries of culture and language.
After all, we in the humanities seek to understand the whole human condition. To discuss and understand different cultures, we must use our various languages to expand our horizons. These codings at least allow for electronic mail communications, but these extensions are stopgap solutions at best. And multilingual support needs to be built into more than browsers - it needs to be integrated into conferencing environments, annotation tools and other working environments. Humanists overwhelmingly recognize the need for access to and use of high quality images and for tools designed for use in archival image annotations, as well as for search and retrieval functions.