Creating the digital humanities
It might seem strange that the man who touts the high-tech advances of the digital age also loves a good rotary phone and medieval manuscript. But for Jeffrey Schnapp, whose work and passion exist largely at the intersection of disparate worlds, the three complement each other perfectly. A yellow, doughnut-shaped telephone from the 1950s sits in his airy Harvard office, a nod to kitsch and culture. Nearby are old typewriters from the early part of the 20th century and cumbersome calculating machines that he uses to maintain the tactile feel of an earlier era under his fingertips. Older still are the folios that litter the floor, unbound sections from a catalog of the Roman Cassinate library of 1725. A pioneer in digital humanities, Schnapp considers the Internet a tool that can illuminate ephemera, that can unlock scholarly possibilities and connections between the physical and the virtual, the modern and the ancient, and that...