As we near the end of 2014 and reflect on what we have achieved in the past year and what we hope to achieve in 2015,  I encourage you to read “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene”, a talk by Bethany Nowviskie delivered at the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. 

Of course Bethany mentions the Great Parchment Book, “a brittle wad since the Guildhall fire over two centuries ago, and now unfolded virtually and legible again”, in the context of successes with “the digital recovery of texts, objects, and traces of human experience thought long since lost to time. Here (from the outside, at least), DH accomplishments look magical.”

This thought provoking piece on the place of technology and the humanities in the world as it is now and will be in the future, has provoked a wide-ranging discussion which you can follow from the links in Bethany’s blog.

And if you want to catch-up more generally with what happened at the the Digital Humanities 2014 conference, details – including videos of many of the talks – are posted on the DH2014 website. Professor Melissa Terras from UCL who was Programme Committee chair delivers Bethany’s talk which was the Community Plenary lecture.