Several people now have asked if I would retell the story of how HASTAC was born.  HASTAC's purpose was always multiple and HASTAC's energy comes from being so defined loosely that its networked community can have a major hand in shaping its mission to the demands and urgencies of the moment.  Of course, all education should both preserve the best of the past and be responsive to the present--on order to prepare for the future.  HASTAC was formed to take stock of the learning opportunities and demands of the interactive digital age and to insist that something fundamental and foundational had changed in the arrangements of learning.   HASTAC insisted prescriptive forms of learning and exceptional specialization had an important place in education, but there were also social implications about learning in the digital age that required all of us to pause, and think together, in the broadest and deepest terms, about what learning means.   And how we might do it better.

That has certainly been the case over the last few years with the remarkable HASTAC Scholars, 125 or so graduate and undergraduate students from over 40 institutions, and the most energetic of contributors to new ways of thinking together on line.   When you explore the blogs and forums on this website, you find the most thoughtful and challenging thinking just about anywhere being led by students who practice what they preach.  

Right now, three of the HASTAC Scholars--Bola, Amanda S, and Amanda V--are asking deep, challenging, and important questions about the Digital Humanities over in a blog called "What Are We Doing Anyway?" and the comments thereafter.  Here's the link: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/bola-c-king/what-are-we-doing-anyway I invite you to drop in and offer your ideas.   Other students are pursuing a different line of thought in a Forum called "Grading 2.0:  Evaluation in the Digital Age."   By the end, these strands of discussion start weaving in and out of one another, and that is the point too.

As in the parable of the visually impaired trying to figure out the shape of the elephant, HASTAC came about because no one part of what, in 2002, was "digital humanities" or "humanities computing" amounted to anything even close to the world-changing rearrangements of communication, commerce, politics, intellectual life, and learning facilitated globally by digital and mobile technologies.   A relatively tight-knit group of Digital Humanities scholars were working assiduously and with dedication at building archives and tools and changing the landscape of humanistic knowledge in one part of our disciplinary humanities elephant while, in another part of the elephant, there was huge handwringing that Technology was ruining the humanities, destroying knowledge as we knew it, and was the enemy of us all.  David Theo Goldberg and I were at a meeting at the Mellon Foundation for directors of humanities centers and institutes and shocked that this last bit (the horror of the technologically-rapacious future and the need to bar the doors against the techno-barbaric Digital Youth storming at the doors) was everywhere in the air for our colleagues.  There were a few derisive comments about Digital Humanities but the real wrath was for a changing society.  Remember 2002 is about when Wikipedia got going; Google barely Googled back then, it wasn't even a verb yet.

David and I had met once or maybe twice before then, but we stepped out of the meeting and said we had to get something going.  We convened a meeting of like-minded friends from all disciplines--from computer science to the arts--at UCHRI in 2003 and realized that, well, this HASTAC thing wasn't much of a field, but it was a very, very impressive elephant.  We liked it.  At first, no one else did.  The low point was being denounced in a keynote address at a major professional association annual meeting as "charlatans."  (Quote/unquote).   We knew we were on to something then.  

What was different about HASTAC from other Digital Humanities organizations is we were about the first organization to embrace Web 2.0 and social media as learning platforms.  We immediately grasped the idea that technology as an affordance would always be limited, but thinking and working together, even across boundaries and especially across boundaries, would allow us to blow old and stale and partial paradigms out of the water.   I always go back to the Dunhuang Project which is traditional digital humanities in the most glorious way---and also more.  By putting back together the pieces of plunder from 19th century imperialists, you restore a destroyed history.   More, by putting together the intellectual and historical insights, analysis, interpretation, and traditions of scholars previously separated, you make a new history.  Gerry Heng's work at the University of Texas on the new medieval world is exactly like that too.  Boundaries are different if you use technology as a way to cross the boundaries of your own disciplinary, locational, demographic, and institutional knowledges.

The rest is history.   Always historicize, as Fred Jameson famously said (a rather ahistorical statement itself).  History-making is always a do-over.  That's the point.  Perspective never stays still which means the archive always changes, looking a little different each time we dip into it.   So the questions being asked now by these three HASTAC Scholars are the same and also very different from the ones asked in 2002 when we formed HASTAC.   And it is thrilling to see these foundatiion questions being asked again.  To ask is to learn, to explore.  And the key questions of how we think, learn, interact, organize, communicate, and even think in a digitally-connected world (such as blogging) will keep on being important as long as we keep on thinking in important ways. 

About 5000+ unique visitors each week come read and write and think along with us now at HASTAC so something is happening here, and we know the HASTAC Scholars are among the leaders in a new way of rethinking what we do and how we can think and learn together.

Keep asking!   There are no answers but, as long as you ask, the questions are vital and technology, rather than destroying all our lives, can make an audience, connection, a network that is the future, we still believe, of a humanities committed to active engagement in a world where learning, contribution, and interaction remain defining features of human beings.