..as a Belgian demographer once said, ‚God has chosen to give the easy problems to the physicists‛ (Wunsch 1995), but still what stings is the lack of curiosity and daring, made even sharper by the occasional flashes of brilliance and exhortation to think (quite literally) out of the box. The fate of the majority specialism of text-analysis was effectively pronounced by Rosanne Potter in 1989: ‚literary computing‛, she wrote, ‚... has not been rejected, but rather neglected‛ by mainstream critics (1989: xvi).

Our motivations matter personally because they are, quite literally, what keep us going. We are in this respect (I very much hope) no different from the American working men and women whom oral historian Studs Terkel interviewed in his wonderful book, Working: People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do. We also want, as he said of them, daily meaning as well as daily bread... recognition as well as cash... astonishment rather than torpor; in short... a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying‛

In his very short short-story, ‚Popular Mechanics‛, collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1996/1981), Raymond Carver describes the final moments of a man leaving his wife. He tries to take a framed picture of their baby from the bedroom, but she snatches it away. Then, on his way out, he says, ‚I want the baby‛. His wife, who is holding the child firmly in her arms, resists his attempt to take it, there is a struggle and feeling the baby slip out of his hands ‚he pulled back very hard. In this manner,‛ Carver writes, ‚the issue was decided‛ (1996/1981: 105). I won’t ask whether you spot the biblical allusion, rather what sort of computing system might, and – here is the essential bit – how that system would relate to the scholar’s reading of Carver’s fiction. What’s essential here is that the finding of the alluded text be a trigger, not an answer.

In 1900 the German mathematician David Hilbert delivered a lecture in Paris in which he laid out the problems he thought mathematics might deal with in the coming century. Before getting to them he said what he thought were the general criteria which mark a good one. He demanded first clarity and ease of comprehension, but then went on to say that such a problem‚ should be difficult in order to entice us, yet not completely inaccessible, lest it mock at our efforts.

What I fear most of all for us is not the cuts to funding, which holding to our purpose we can survive, but the loss of purpose through complicity in the industrialisation of the digital humanities. What I fear is that we find ourselves in Charlie Chaplin’s place in Modern Times (1936), on some production-line, making widgets for a purpose over which we have no say and which we are likely to have forgotten. Such a fate we cannot survive. Instead of a research practice it means a typing pool sort of dying that produces step-‘n-fetchit facilitators who are safe from all risk by conforming to the bureaucrat’s template of knowledge-work.