Men louen of propre kynde newfangelnesse. (Chaucer, The Squire’s Tale, l. 610).

My daughter is fascinating.   For the first month or so, caring for a newborn seemed to be a series of diaper changes, sleepless nights, and incessant feedings, but a few weeks back she started interacting with the world.  Miss S, as we call her, woke up when she was 5 weeks old: she began to look at objects, track movements, and turn towards sounds.  Everything became possible and new.  I know that other parents have experienced this before, but it was absolutely fascinating for me to watch her wake up to the world.

The digital humanities is a bit like Miss S at 5 weeks…it seems that people are just now beginning to wake up to the technology that’s always been around them.  For the first time in years people from the humanities and social sciences are making tentative lunch appointments with faculty in computer science or reading TechCrunch and logging onto Twitter to see how the latest trends might change their corner of the world.

It’s not as if the digital humanities didn’t exist before now, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that the phrase began to appear in job listings, journal articles, and message boards (or rather, that the reach of digital humanities extended into more mainstream academic channels).  Sure, there were some souls who ventured into those uncharted technical waters before it became cool, but I would wager that most people hadn’t thought about how their research and the digital humanities could cozy up before now.

Honestly, I’m not sure if all of the un-conferences, coding workshops, and invited lectures can really give people a thorough understanding of such a complex field…especially because the discipline is growing, morphing, and changing as more people help to define it.  This “newfangelnesse” of which Chaucer speaks heralds in a new age, but it also serves as a caution for us as scholars: just because we’re opening our eyes for the first time and discovering something new, doesn’t mean it wasn’t already there.  Moreover, through all our excitement, we still need to approach the digital humanities with the same critical acuity that we give more established disciplines.

We’re having a garage sale this weekend, providing Seattle’s weather improves (currently it’s 55 and rainy).  Our little house can’t hold anymore flotsam and jetsam so, like many before us, we’re going through our house room-by-room and searching for items that need a new home.  Neither Kevin nor I wanted to tackle the library.  We’re both readers…of history, of fiction, of anything with words…and more than that, we love physical books.  So it was with great trepidation, sadness, and wringing of hands that we opened the library door and began to choose books for the sale.  The almost-new Penguin Classics that were a mainstay of both of our undergraduate days (do we really need three copies of Tess of the d’Urbervilles)?  Gone.  That bargain book we purchased at Barnes and Noble on a whim and then discovered we’d read it years before?  Out.

Those books were easy, but the choices became much less clear when we started to go through books that held memories, inscriptions, and history.  I couldn’t bear to throw out a paperback of Great Expectations because it was my mother’s copy and still has her notes from a literature course she took in 1971.  That copy of Gerard Manley Hopkins a friend inscribed to me in 1995?  It’s still on the shelf and I admit that I took a few minutes to read “Heaven-Haven” again.  The well-worn Field Guide of North American Birds that holds the remnants of my childhood obsession with bird-watching also stayed with us, even though two new editions have come out since then, rendering the book obsolete as a field guide.

None of these books are special of their own account–it’s the memories that I attach to them (and the handwritten effort that others took when they gifted these books to me)–that makes the difference in whether I threw the book on the FOR SALE pile or placed it gingerly back on the shelf.

I read an interesting essay by Amanda Katz on whether our children will inherit our e-books, which asks the same sort of question and–unsurprisingly for me, at least–arrives at the same answer that I did.  In particular, Katz’s closing paragraph rings particularly true:

But when I think of sorting through the boxes of my grandmother’s books — even the ones we couldn’t keep, or didn’t want — and what we found there, I am grateful not to have been handed her Amazon password instead. Among all the gifts of the electronic age, one of the most paradoxical might be to illuminate something we are beginning to trade away: the particular history, visible and invisible, that can be passed down through the vessel of an old book, inscribed by the hands and the minds of readers who are gone.

Katz is obviously dealing with a slightly different topic than I am, but I think that all book-lovers experience a sort of loss when we decide to part with a physical book.  There is a sense of sadness when I remove a book from a shelf, especially when the remaining books begin to collapse inward.     This history-making physicality doesn’t ring true when I pass an e-book along to a friend.  Perhaps I’m giving the physical book too much credit, or maybe it’s because e-books are so immaterial in my world that I don’t attach the emotional value to them as I do with physical books.  Tomorrow, when I sit in my lawn chair with my umbrella over the box of books, my reading histories will travel with these books to their next home, and the one after that.  I can’t imagine that in 10 years I’ll have a yards sale with a sign that reads “e-books: $1.”