Manifestos. Sometimes you need them, but mostly, you don't.

My new official UC Berkeley website is under construction. Helvetica is such a pretty font, no wonder they made a whole documentary about it.

But anyway, one of my newest projects this year concerns the "digital humanities", which is all very exciting for those of us on the engineering side of things, i.e. those of us who make a living doing stuff. For those on the other side, the humanities folks, it seems to mainly consist of writing long articles, manifestos, and asking searching-sounding questions like "what do we need to do to bring the humanities into the 21st century"?

There's definitely a time and a place for manifestos, guys, but what you really need to do here is hire a bunch of computer scientists and UI designers and let them get to work. Enough with the committes and articles defining what the digital humanities are. There's work to be done, let's do it! End of story.