Culture and Technology: The Way We Live Now, What Is to be Done

Abstract

The paper addresses the so-called “Crisis in the Humanities” in the context of two of its most apparent symptoms: the digital transformation of our museums and archives, and the explicitly parallel “Crisis in Tenure and Publishing” that has more recently come to attention. It introduces and frames a practical proposal, now underway, for dealing with both. This is the NINES initiative: Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship. The rationale of NINES is described, including the initial set of digital tools now in active development. The general aim of NINES is to move the rethinking of literary and cultural studies, method as well as theory, by establishing an institutionalized mechanism (peer-reviewed) for new kinds of digital-based analytic and interpretive practices.