future

At the end of yesterday's HASTAC 08 conference, TechnoTravels/TeleMobility: HASTAC in Motion, one of HASTAC's founding leaders as well as one of the conference organizers, David Theo Goldberg, made inspiring parting words. During his closing talk, he coined a new term: "Mobile Humanities." This adds a new dimension to the traditional "digital humanities" by emphasizing not only the digitizing of the enormous range of cultural documents across time and place, but also HASTAC's goal to ensure that humanistic thinking is crucial to how we think about the information age, new technologies, the academy, disciplines, and learning, not only in formal education but lifelong. Mobile Humanities isn't just about technology but about all of the social arrangements changing as a result of mobile technologies, past and present. And, in the end, Mobile Humanities are about inspiring humanists to think about their charge as educators, to take seriously the challenges their students face and the future that those students will help to shape.

What a year! HASTAC has accomplished so much in the past 12 months . . . An update on plans for new interactive elements on our website and a new program of HASTAC Scholars, graduate and undergraduate, to help to enliven, communicate, and report on new media, digital and participatory learning, net activism, and other issues in our field.