Humanist is an international electronic seminar on humanities computing and the digital humanities, in the form of a long-running electronic mailing list and its associated archive. The primary aim of Humanist is to provide a forum for discussion of intellectual, scholarly, pedagogical, and social issues and for exchange of information among members. The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view. ... Electronic mailing lists are a special usage of e-mail that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. ...

Humanist is a publication of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and the Office for Humanities Communication (OHC) and an affiliated publication of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The American Council of Learned Societies, founded in 1919, is a private non-profit federation of sixty-eight scholarly organizations. ...

History and current scope

The Humanist list was created in 1987 by Willard McCarty, then at the University of Toronto, as a Bitnet/NetNorth electronic mail network for people who support computing in the humanities. McCarty, now at King's College London, has continued to edit it since then. 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The University of Toronto (U of T) is a non-denominational, provincially-supported, coeducational public research university located in Toronto, Ontario. ... Kings College London was founded in 1829 and received its royal charter that same year, making it Englands third oldest university institution (predated only by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge). ...

Although Humanist started off as a means of communication for people directly involved in the support of humanities computing, it has grown in scope to become an extended conversation about the nature of "humanities computing" (or "digital humanities", or one of a contested range of other names), about what computing looks like viewed from the humanities, and humanities from computing: "Humanist remains the forum within which the technology, informed by the concerns of humane learning, can be viewed from an interdisciplinary common ground." [1]

There are currently (September 2006) a little under 1400 subscribers. This seems low for such a long-running list, but high given that Humanist requires subscribers to supply a brief biography when subscribing. Look up September in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... 2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

External links

• http://www.princeton.edu/humanist Humanist home page
• A self-description and brief history of Humanist
• Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)
• Office for Humanities Communication (OHC)
• American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)