This is not my motivation for engaging in HC-related work. I do it to help change the relationship between higher education and society, bc I fundamentally don't think research and publication should be about nurturing little cliques of insiders with privileged access to "scholarship" as now. Universities need to get back to the more fundamental mission of disseminating knowledge, and ease up on the gatekeeping role.

No disagreement there Ross, but that's not why I asked the question. Seems to me that being able to document specific success stories would only enhance our credibility with the funders, administrators, and other powers that be that allow us to do our work.

I'm writing from the road. More in a day or two . . .

Here's a copy of the post, slightly edited for context, that I just sent off to Humanist:

I appreciate the several, patient responses to my admittedly tendentious question.

Let me see if I can address some of the points people have made and clarify my own thinking.

I read Literary and Linguistic Computing too, but I'm not satisfied that all we need to do is look there, or to the closing paragraphs of our
latest article, to gauge the impact of our field. Note that I wrote "impact," not value or worth. Since the early 1990s (and earlier) many
of us have committed time, money, and less tangible forms of professional capital to the construction of (to adopt a phrase) digital
resources in the humanities. I think anyone who does this work quickly moves beyond any residual positivism and arrives at the realization that
the process is what's most compelling about the activity--this is what I take it to mean to imagine what we don't know, or to quote from some
pretty awful music I used to listen to by a certain Canadian rock trio, "the point of the journey is not to arrive." Fine. But I don't for a
moment believe anyone who has ever spent time on a schema, ontology, or taxonomy, to say nothing of the long hours of encoding, imaging, or
worrying over the placement of a button on an interface hasn't conceived of an ideal user who comes to their resource, accesses the materials,
and then uses them as the basis for a piece of scholarship that could not have otherwise been written. Nor do I buy the notion that what we do
in humanities computing is so rarefied that it can't be held accountable to what are, after all, some fairly conventional criteria for
scholarship: "a problem solved, a question answered, received wisdom overturned, or new things learned." (Nor do I accept, incidentally, that the kind of knowledge gleaned from a scanning electron microscope is purely of the preceding nature. To create a binary between the two seems
to me to essentialize both humanities and sciences in mutually unproductive ways.) Steve says we would do better to ask, "what have we
done that's interesting?" I submit that being interesting is the easy part; we're all pretty interesting after our own fashion, but I would
rather ask at what point does "interest" pass into something that circulates macroscopically in a scholarly economy of citation and influence? In such a way that others have to stand up (or sit down) and take notice of an insight?

I note that I'm not alone in this observation: in an abstract of a talk delivered last week here at Maryland, John Bradley writes: "Digital
Libraries seemed like a great thing for Humanities scholarship when they were first proposed. Why, then, do they seem to have had relatively little impact on how humanists do their scholarship?"

The rhetorical presumption behind my post is not that such cases don't exist (gotcha, the emperor has no clothes) but rather that we would do
well, if for no other reason than eminently practically ones of funding, outreach, recruitment, tenure, and promotion, to be able to point to some influential discoveries. I can think of a few examples off the top of my head: Kevin Kiernan's imaging work on the Beowulf manuscript; Will Thomas and Ed Ayers's work on American slavery, based on data compiled for their Valley of the Shadow project. I would like to hear of others, and perhaps think in terms of collectively assembling a casebook of digital humanities scholarship.

One last point: in so far as there is a latent tension between positivism and empiricism in what I've been writing what I'm ultimately aiming for is the latter. I _do_ believe empiricism has its place in the humanities--and humanities computing. Indeed, I believe empiricism is under-theorized and under-taught. There's a fascinating exchange on Blake's color printing processes in recent issues of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly that would make rich reading material for a
graduate research methods course. Call it a strategic essentialism or local knowledge if you prefer: but what can digital resources contribute
to a debate over the state of empirical knowledge in the humanities?