Special effects; or, the tooling is here. Where are the results?

Abstract

Technological developments tend to move at a very different speed from their cultural assimilation. Hence it is not surprising that impressive technical wizardry should be used in culturally unimpressive ways. The real problem is one of imaginative maturity. Here I argue that Choueka’s old question, “The tools are here; where are the results?”, similarly directs humanist scholars to pay attention first to development of theory rather than to the features of software. For those who know where to look, the results we do have are hardly unimpressive, but to argue their importance requires a new understanding of both theory and practice. The problem scholars face is twofold: first to develop a computational discourse adequate to the best artefactual theories we have; second to reconceive their computational practices as a matter of tooling rather than tool-use. For computer science the biggest challenge is to understand and implement dynamical scholarly practices as they metamorphose from one temporary state to the next.