DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
Changing the Center of Gravity: Transforming Classical Studies Through
Cyberinfrastructure
2009
Volume 3 Number 1
2009
Volume 3 Number 1
Foreword
Abstract
A brief remembrance of Ross Scaife.
This is a book about the future, not about Ross Scaife. That's
the way it should be, and that's the way he would have wanted
it.
For Ross was a scholar and teacher who knew in his bones that
the steady, thoughtful consideration of the human past is a tool
of unmatched power for informing humankind's ability to imagine
and enact futures worthy of the intelligence and dignity of its
every member. To honor him best, we should share in that
conviction and learn from the resourcefulness and persistence of
his practice.
Ross's career flourished in the twin decades of the information
revolution. Whatever the globalized society we share may now
experience, we live ineluctably in an information society. What
we invent now, what we do now will entail living out the
implications of a transformation that has already happened.
Through the too few years that Ross was given to shape his
vision and share it with others, he kept his eye clearly on ways
to make sure that the revolution in knowing will serve his
profession and through it his society.
His convictions were clear and luminous. The best that we can
know about the past needs to be preserved and disseminated by
the most powerful media available to the widest audience
possible. The Stoa consortium that he led gave example
repeatedly to the force of those convictions and their power to
change for the better the ways we learn and think and teach.
We both learned from, were inspired by, and benefited from
Ross's friendship. We feel the ache of his loss deeply, but we
are delighted to see in this volume an exactly appropriate
response to loss: innovation, optimism, and the commitment of
teachers and scholars to receiving, interpreting, and
transmitting the heritage of humankind's pasts to its present
and future. Ross, we think, would be glad to read this book, and
then soon enough impatient to get beyond its insights to the
next stage. He reminds us of another Kentuckyan of yore, Daniel
Boone, who made it to the frontier ahead of the rest, and then
kept uprooting and moving further west, always seeing and
seizing opportunity, always staying at the leading edge. We owe
him the tribute of emulation.