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I want to open up a discussion and maybe put together a working group focused on what I want to pre-emptively call “the hardware turn” in digital humanities. (I say, let’s start calling it that, and we can just will the thing into existence after the fact. If it doesn’t exist already.)

What’s the hardware turn? Well, sometime after humanities scholars realized that they had spent so much time talking about “texts” that they could start talking about “books” again (and practices and performances and design and…), digital humanists realized that they had spent so much time thinking and writing code and markup and software and building databases and making everything powerfully cross-platform, etc. —

— that a chunk of them could start and NEEDED to start working on and with hardware again. Thinking about hardware. Hacking hardware. Using completely different hardware from desktop computers. Maybe making their own hardware.