This year the contributions have come from three countries and across 9 time-zones, the results assembled in London with Photoshop and put online for the daughter in Alaska and the son in Toronto to print out for their own use. It is true that the technology we use to bring ourselves together was involved in creating the distances in the first place, but I want to stretch beyond the irony of that. My point is that the technology is part of who we now are, what we have to hand to remake ourselves, and that life without it is inconceivable. In humanities scholarship, I would argue, the most important computing we do is done in wetware, for example in the marking up of a text, when anticipating how what we perceive about the text must be rendered for the computer to process it, we think now like a computer, now like a human, and as a result zero in on the zone between. And as a result start to think very differently about the old cultural artefacts.
Scholarship begins to mean something new.
We're not so different either. Formerly we thought, if only I could talk to him or her. Now we can, and we discover that communion requires more, including a whole new set of skills mirroring the characteristics of the medium and people's behaviour in response to these. The demands on us reach farther down into us. But as in classroom teaching, there's really no very good way to measure the effects, to know what's happened that might not otherwise.