By skyforbes 
The myth of the humanities as the terrain of the solitary genius, laboring alone on a creative work, which, when completed, would be remarkable for its singularity—a philosophical text, a definitive historical study, a paradigm-shifting work of literary criticism—is, of course, a myth. Genius does exist, but knowledge has always been produced and accessed in ways that are fundamentally distributed, although today this is more true than ever.
Once again, the “of course” signals that we are in the realm of ideology. As an empirical matter, the solitary scholar laboring on a singular paradigm-shifting work is quite real. Mimesis is not a myth, and neither is Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, or Philosophy in a New Key, or The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy—you can go to the library and check them out (or, if that takes too long, download them). There is no contradiction between this fact and the idea that knowledge is “fundamentally distributed.” Scholarship is always a conversation, and every scholar needs books to write books. Humanistic scholarship has always been additive and collaborative even if it has not been in the strict sense collective. It is not immediately clear why things should change just because the book is read on a screen rather than a page.
This is not to say, of course, that traditional scholars, even “solitary geniuses,” cannot make use of digital tools. They already do: just about every scholarly book written today is written on a computer, and every query takes the form of an e-mail, and some advanced scholarly methods rely on exciting new technological tools. The translation of books into digital files, accessible on the Internet around the world, can be seen as just another practical tool like these, which facilitates but does not change the actual humanistic work of thinking and writing. Indeed, as McGann argues in his new essay collection A New Republic of Letters, the translation of the world’s libraries into digital form represents a major opportunity for a revival of philology, the most traditional kind of textual scholarship. So far, he points out, “we are not even close to developing browser interfaces to compare with the interfaces that have evolved in the past 500 years of print technology.”
If some digital humanists do see a contradiction between individual genius and digital practice, it is because more is at stake here than whether you read on the page or online. For the authors of Digital_Humanities, it is a truism that a change in the medium of knowledge means a change in the structure and even the essence of knowledge. Inspired by a naïve kind of historical materialism, they take for granted that the kind of knowledge available to the reader of a scroll is different from that of a codex, which is different from that of a printed book, which is different from that of a screen. That is why “digital humanists imagine the past and the future in ways that fundamentally transform the authoring practices of poets and historians, using new sets of tools, technologies, and design strategies. For digital humanists, authorship is rooted in the processes of design and the creation of the experiential, the social, and the communal.”