Wulf offers as examples the work of IATH scholars like Jerry McGann and Ed Ayers. It is both inevitable and important that we hear today about the methodologies of hypertextual historiographers like Ed, textual theorists like Jerry and my Vassar colleague Nancy Ide, and Willard McCarty. We will need to consider specific instances of scholarly work with data sets and data bases, text encoding and texts, image annotation and recognition, electronic publication and communication, global information systems, synchronous and asynchronous virtual communities, search engines and software agents, immersive computer environments and simulations, and the several other areas of humanities computing which are represented here today and whose methodologies I would not presume to characterize in detail. Instead, I wish to touch on broad methodological perspectives and interstitial relationships. I want to talk about the uses to which we humanists put ourselves in computing environments, and what spaces we inhabit and increasingly create.
Humanists create potentiated spaces in computer environments.
I want to characterize a few of these methodological spaces or perspectives for you. The first such space is what we might call aporetic space, the space of doubt, skepticism, and consideration which eventually yields possibility, valorization, persistence, and meaning. While humanists might agree with him about the distraction, I hope that in the spirit of today's dialogue I can suggest a potentiated space of difference. We are surely not the first, but we are surely the most self-conscious age in terms of seeing ourselves living before a constantly impending future. Eschatological ages have both their virtues and their particular vices.