Humanists revisited: A longitudinal look at the adoption of information technology

Abstract

Developments in information technology have had a major impact on the conduct of research and scholarship. In general, humanists have been slower than scientists and social scientists to adopt new technologies in their work. This paper, a longitudinal study of eleven humanists, corroborates the general pattern and provides insight into why humanists use technology as they do. It relates its findings to a definition of the humanities: Those fields of scholarship that strive to reconstruct, describe, and interpret the activities and accomplishments of men and women by establishing and studying documents and artifacts created by those men and women. The discussion emphasizes that the primary evidence that humanists use differentiates them from scientists and social scientists.