Notes on Digital Groundhog Day

Some Personal Background

The observations behind these theses and proposals come from a fairly long academic biography, which was spent completely within the interdisciplinary domain. All the professional positions I have held required a combination of qualifications from history (or cultural heritage) and computer science (or rather software engineering), occasionally sprinkled with a taste of sociology. After spending twenty years at the then Max-Planck-Institute for History in Göttingen (an institute dedicated to basic research) to work on software systems for the handling of historical sources, I became director of a university-wide digital humanities center in Bergen, Norway. In 2000, I became a professor at the University at Cologne for historisch-kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung (roughly, information processing for the historical-cultural disciplines). Do not worry: even native speakers do not understand this result of a convoluted name-finding process at the faculty. For some of my positions in this essay, it is important to know, however, that together with a second professor, I was responsible for the application of computational methods to disciplines across the humanities, with an understanding of the field heavily biased toward hard-core software technology. Graduates are, for example, expected to be able to program in a higher programming language.

Informationsverarbeitung (for the humanities) at the University at Cologne is understood to be a full-fledged academic subject, offering a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree. Bachelor students are always required to combine Informationsverarbeitung with another humanities discipline; master’s students usually do, and doctoral students usually explore the application of information technology to one of the traditional humanities disciplines. The programs start with approximately one hundred undergraduate students and around twenty master’s students each year. In 2015, around 60 percent of those earning a degree with Informationsverarbeitung as a major found employment outside of academia, with 20 percent in the cultural heritage sector and 20 percent in academia.

My involvement in curricular discussions went considerably beyond this program, however. I was heavily involved in a series of workshops discussing an international curriculum for history and computing in 1992 and 1993 (Spaeth et al., Towards an International Curriculum; Davis et al., Teaching of Historical Computing). Furthermore, I participated in the European “aco*hum” project, which between 1996 and 1999 prepared a report on the status of the use of computers in the humanities, identifying research issues as well as teaching models and tentative curricula (de Smedt et al., Computing in Humanities Education). More recently I initiated a working group of the Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum (or DHd), the German member organization of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (or ADHO), resulting in a comprehensive catalog of all German degree courses in digital humanities and a statement of principles for a reference curriculum (Sahle, Digitale Geisteswissenschaften; Sahle, DH Studieren!).2

Differences between the American and the European University Systems

These experiences obviously shaped the opinions expressed in this essay. A second introductory statement is required to understand some of the positions taken, which are rather obvious in a European context but possibly enigmatic in an American one.

Until 1998 or 1999, continental European university systems had widely different curricular and degree structures. Most had some significant exams at roughly the stage where one would expect a BA and an MA, but in many cases, these were intermediate checkpoints that did not result in a degree. As a result, most study programs at universities were conceptualized monolithically, with a change of universities at some stage acceptable but without any provisions for it. When I studied history in Austria in the early seventies, I had only three options from the first term onward: passing a final state examination to earn qualifications as a teacher in secondary education, getting a doctorate, or failing.

This situation changed somewhat after the seventies toward more clearly defined intermediate degrees, but the structures still varied widely across Europe. As this impeded the integration of the union—and more specifically academic exchange—a group of forty-eight countries around the European Union agreed upon a reform process that culminated in a model which, with some local variance, has led to a system that typically leads to a BA after three years and an MA after two more years; this is the so-called Bologna process.

Academia is exceptionally good at resisting change. Although the degree structure on the surface is now like the Anglo-American one, changes are much less significant under the hood. Anglo-American curricula are usually structured with the expectation that the student will switch institutions after the BA, but most European degree programs have been created with the tacit assumption that the standard case will be an MA at the institution that awarded the BA. As a result, in most European countries, MA programs have still much more narrowly defined requirements than their relatives on the other side of the Atlantic, which implies at the same time BA programs with a greater degree of specialization. Therefore, a BA with a major in digital humanities and a minor in English studies, history, or another more traditional discipline is perfectly feasible. On the other hand, MA programs also often assume a major/minor structure, so an MA program in digital humanities may concentrate considerably more on technical knowledge—with the content to be provided by the other subject chosen—than an MA in “digital X,” where the digital components just provide some specialized flavor within a content driven profile. Doctoral theses in the digital humanities are in this environment frequently co-supervised by a computational and a content-oriented supervisor.

The fact that in most European countries it is typical for students to start a bachelor’s program at the age of 18, 20, or 21 also changes the climate of undergraduate courses: the separation between undergraduate and graduate teaching is much less pronounced in most European university systems. Courses that can be taken either as part of a bachelor’s or a master’s degree are not unheard of. This is the reason that in the following text, it may not always be obvious at which level the comments are directed.

Back to the Opening Question

Why have so many programs failed, and why do the discussions seem to form an endless loop? I do not know when the first-degree program that would fall under today’s umbrella of the digital humanities was established. Leaning toward my area of specialization, in 1989 there existed three fully developed MA courses in history and computing in the United Kingdom: at Hull, at the University of London (a cooperation between three colleges), and at Glasgow (Davis, “Postgraduate Experience in the UK”). None has survived. In 1986 at the University of Utrecht, a department for computers and the humanities with twelve permanent full-time positions was founded, offering fifteen full-term courses plus thesis supervision to be integrated into all degree programs of the humanities; this allowed degrees with a heavy computational element in all study programs offered by the faculty (Mandemakers, “History and Computing at Dutch Universities”). The department was, after some time, moved to the faculty of information science and no longer boasts any connection to the humanities faculty. In 1999, at least eight universities in seven European countries offered degree programs based on dedicated departments (Orlandi, “European Studies on Formal Methods,” 20–22). Beyond that, about one hundred additional offerings on various levels, where the boundary with computational linguistics is almost impossible to define, are listed under headings more closely related to individual disciplines. King’s College is the only one of the eight universities where the BA minor program offered at the time shows a clear continuity with today, and by “continuity” I mean that at the end of the period, the courses offered are easily recognizable as similar to the ones offered at the start of the period. Glasgow started with a degree in history and computing then moved to a degree that referred to the digital humanities, which was so focused on digital preservation that it was more of a library degree and has since changed back to what looks more like mainstream DH.

Everyone at the various accidental and intentional meetings dedicated to curricular questions I mentioned, or implying these questions, agreed that a clearer definition of the program requirements would be needed for the sustainability and sharpness of the degree profiles offered, as well as for the ten to fifty times more courses offered at all imaginable subdegree levels. The main reasons given by participants included the following: making sure that graduates would fit the requirements of the academic job market; offering a clear profile to nonacademic employers outside of the traditional humanities labor market; making qualifications more easily comparable among different institutes of higher learning; increasing the trust of students as well as employers of graduates in the quality of degrees and qualifications offered; and making it easier to establish new degree programs (and departments) by having the ability to point to established standards when negotiating with university administration. This incomplete catalog goes back to three questions, which can be traced back to the first generation of conferences on matters computational in a humanities context: What do I have to know to profit from this fascinating movement? Where can I learn it? Whom can I hire to take over the computing part of my interdisciplinary project? The transformation of this earlier list into the later one simply reflects the realization that having learned to use digital methods for one’s own research project enhances one’s profile as a potential teacher of digital methods.

Why, if this interest goes back so far and if focused and organized discussions go back at least forty years, do we still not have a clear idea what a degree that provides computational skills and methodologies for humanists should consist of? The following three theses and a summarizing fourth one try to answer this question.3

1. Very few DH degrees are established due to an intrinsic epistemic interest in “the field.” They are rather established because of the glamour of novelty that may coax support out of administrative/political structures reluctant to support the humanities as such.

   This is not to deny that some people, basically the primary proponents of a new degree, have epistemic interests. Rather, my claim is that when selling the degree in an administrative and political environment, this interest ceases to be important.

   From the beginning, most approaches to the application of computational or digital methods to humanities fields emphasize very early in their argumentation that humanities questions must be more important in the mix than technology.

   Thus, as already indicated, the person who wants to use a computer in anthropological work of any sophistication must know a great deal of anthropology, but he doesn’t require much more knowledge of computers than is contained in this paper. (Lamb and Romney, “Anthropologist’s Introduction to the Computer,” 88)

   That not “much more knowledge of computers than is contained in this paper,” originally published in 1962, referred to the ability to program in machine language gives the argument in my opinion an even sharper profile. Try not to learn too much about the computer side of things, just what you “really need.” Many found it always reassuring, at least from 1970 onward, that you had to understand computers just sufficiently that “you could talk to the technicians” (my summary of Société des Historiens Médiévistes, La Démographie Médiévale, 62–69).

   Are you reading a paper by a techno-freak who complains that his toy is not taken seriously enough? Definitely not. But please remember that we are talking about teaching not research. When you are interested in the novel in the nineteenth century and listen to a fascinating paper at a conference applying quantitative stylistics, it is absolutely correct and sensible that you economize your knowledge reception, learning exactly as much about the method that paper has applied as you need to replicate its application for your own research question. When you are teaching a degree in “digital X,” however, you are not supposed to train people to write the paper you are interested in, but to give them the knowledge they need to identify and answer questions you have not thought of yourself. Therefore, shrinking the wide methodological vista opened by some subgroup of digital methodologies to what you must know to show students how to answer the type of question you personally are interested in is inherently shallow. If you are not embracing a broader scope of digital methodologies and technologies relevant for a reasonably broad knowledge domain, but rather the absolute minimum of what is needed to engage with data or digitized materials, you are not teaching “digital X,” you are teaching “X.” And you happen to live in an era when digital tools are simply there, so knowing about one of them is not quite such an earth-shaking qualification.

   In this “content reigns, don’t talk too much about the technology” approach, there is an inherent danger when you want to attract students. When signing up for a degree in “digital X,” students are almost certainly attracted at least as much by the glamour of “the digital” as by the “X.” Otherwise they would have chosen a degree in “X” as it is much more easily accessible. If they then spend 90 percent of their time with the intricacies of X and are learning only very specialized details about “the digital,” they will be disappointed and let others know, which puts the degree program at risk.

   Probably less than 25 percent of all degree courses in “digital X” I have encountered have started with the question “what digital stuff do we have to teach the students to get better at solving the questions of our discipline?” as opposed to “how can we teach this specific technology for the research questions of interest to us?” And the more the second question drives the degree program, the shorter its life expectancy.

   So, if you attract students by the glamour of “the digital” and then talk vaguely about the digital, but do not engage it seriously, you will lose them. Can there be lurking a more general problem? That is, how many graduate programs are really driven by a consensus among the proponents that “the digital” in the humanities should be a driving interest in the study program? Is it not frequently the case that a small number of people actively identifying with “the digital” find support in the wider faculty, because that wider faculty believes that this is a good strategy to convince the administration to continue the funding level (or more simply, the department) when it is threatened? So, you teach “digital X” not because you are interested in “the digital,” but because you want “X” to survive, which leads to a situation where many of those who support the plans of the digital activists have a hidden agenda to get away with as little “digital” as they possibly can. It does not help the situation, that “the digital” may be clear in the mind of the proponents but is usually cloudy in the minds of the remainder of the department or the faculty.

   Here in my experience a situation arises, which at first looks weird, but at a second glance is easily explained. If you are introducing a new graduate program for, say, French studies, you would try to point the local authorities to the best-known examples and any documents of the relevant academic groups that define what a degree in French studies should constitute. You want to make sure that your new degree program can compete with the established standards. In the case of “digital X” in the countries of my experience, this did not happen in the 1980s, nor later, nor last year. The argument to convince the authorities in this case is “we are the very first ones to have ever had that idea!” at academic institutions with well-developed self-esteem. In less self-assured ones: “even the <enter-the-name-of-an-institution-you-assume-to-be-more-prestigious-than-yours> is doing that, but this is so new, by doing this now we can become even better than them.”

   I doubt that I have seen any prospectus for a “digital X” since 1984 that did not either claim that this was the very first of its kind worldwide, or at least emphasize that this degree course was unique, as different from all others ever, it was the very first one . . . which, since I have followed these discussions since the beginning of the 1980s, contributes much to my intimate acquaintance with groundhog days.

   If your main political argument for your graduate degree is that it is a trailblazer, any existing recommendations of what a study program of this kind should look like invalidate that claim. A trail needing blazing has no road map. And “learning from others” is beyond counterproductive politically: if there is a standard for what you want to do, it cannot be all that unique, right?

   But, once you have established your degree course, should you not have an interest in underpinning it by relating it to a consensus model that goes beyond your own campus?

2. The concept behind many degrees and courses consists of the arbitrary bundle of skills available at a given point in time from the current staff at an institution.

   The closing statement of the previous section does not describe my experience from the forty or fifty events during which, over the decades, I have tried to organize terms of reference for interdisciplinary degrees between history/the humanities and computer science/information technologies. Such terms of reference, or a “reference curriculum,” should define what a degree has to contain to be part of a specific denomination, like “DH” (core) and in what ways it can typically be locally extended. I abstain from making that more concrete: if you give a short example of the components of such a reference curriculum, many, if not most, readers tend to misunderstand the example for the full scope of the concept.

   I would like to emphasize that I write the following as a diagnosis and I hope it does not hurt the feelings of any colleagues from some of these meetings who may recognize themselves. That I did not share their opinions does not mean that I did not appreciate them.

   My overall impression is that the implied guarantee of quality given by the possibility of referring to agreed-upon terms of reference would be appreciated. Suspicion and fear that such a recommendation might ask for something that is unavailable locally prevail, however.

   This is interacting in two ways with the situation I diagnosed under my first thesis. As the “X” is much more important than “the digital” for the huge majority of the local supporters of a degree course in “digital X,” local politics become more complicated if you have to work for the inclusion of an element into the degree course where it is not immediately obvious how the local brand of “X” will profit from it.

   This is aggravated by the fact described in the second thesis: “the digital” is a very wide field. The parts of this very wide field represented by the staff available at any humanities institution is a kind of random sample. Say you want to implement a graduate degree for “digital philology” and you are hard-pressed to prove that the staff supporting the required number of teaching hours are available within the faculty, which you have to prove, at least in Germany, before you can start. An offer to teach an introductory course on GIS from archaeology would be extremely hard to decline in this situation. No offense against GIS intended: mappings of various types of relationships can be a valuable tool for philology. But that the capacity for that teaching is available somewhere is not really a convincing reason to include it as a mandatory component of an abstract curriculum. And if after you have collected these local resources you find a reference curriculum that does not include GIS but includes some other skill or methodology unavailable locally, it is absolutely contrary to your interests.4

3. Established DH institutions have the tendency to restrict their offerings to the focus chosen at the time of their establishment. As soon as other parts of the big DH tent are hyped, the established unit tends to lose local support, which is then transferred to the glamour of the most recent novelty.

   The core of the argument presented so far is that “digital X” graduate courses are short lived for two major reasons. (1) Many of them are not initiated based on a consensus at the home institution that “digital X” opens up broad new methodological vistas for X, if “the digital” is embraced consistently. Such an opinion of a very small group of proponents is supported by a wider group who thinks that placating “the digital” helps in a political situation difficult for X. (2) As the courses are usually built upon a rather narrow staff base, the skills and methodological specializations of very few people present locally heavily influence the content of the study programs. This results in offerings which on the one hand are anything but homogeneous, and on the other face great difficulties in implementing any abstract curricular requirements.

   The very few examples of institutions that have kept up continuous graduate programs over longer periods than ten years are indeed usually built upon a more stable platform. King’s College London is probably the institution with the longest-running teaching record that can claim conceptual continuity rather than a succession of fluctuating teaching models. Here the strong platform on which these courses were built is an exceptionally large research and service center for digital methods that offered a broad background of methodological knowledge and skills. At my own university at Cologne, a full-fledged BA/MA/doctoral curriculum has been running since 1997 until the present. There exists a backbone of two professorships that are not digital flavors that derive their reputation from the digitally flavored “real” discipline of the incumbents, but where interdisciplinary work between the humanities and computer science is the not negotiable core.

   Size alone is not a guarantee of survival, though. At Utrecht, the Department for Computers and the Humanities founded in 1986 with twelve full-time positions has after some years drifted into the Faculty of Science. It implemented a very substantial program in mainly database and information retrieval-oriented skills and methods, the focal points of computer-supported work in the humanities in the founding decade. At that point, this was a very sensible focus: if we look beyond a rather narrow definition of “literary computing,” database technology was for many humanities disciplines the most widely discussed technology of the day. But more recently the other departments of the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht perceived a need for training possibilities for their student population in more recent technical and methodological waves, which turned out to be provided more easily outside of the existing structure than within.

   Humanistisk Informatikk at the University of Bergen, founded in 1995 and a full-fledged department in every respect, had originally quite a few links to the digital humanities but drifted during the years towards media studies, acknowledging that with a name change in 2010, and the graduate program it offered sharing that drift.

   A problem for the survival of graduate programs based on large structures is in a sense the reverse of the perspective of many proponents of “digital X.” As many of them justify the engagement with “the digital” with the service it may perform for “X,” it is not really surprising that the faculty of many “Xs” also conceptualizes the whole field as a kind of service unit, which only deserves support as long as it is directly useful for the short term goals of the traditional disciplines, or, rather, the personal interests of local faculty members. And the positions and funding assigned to it are seen as a convenient resource to draw upon when another fashionable trend comes along, from the embrace of which the traditional departments may profit even more.

   Of course, a general program must take care of the immediate needs of the traditional disciplines. But these must not be constrained by whatsoever happens to be the current focus of local research programs. And it is not possible to transfer the responsibility for the more general view to another established institution or department, which is not connected to the humanities. GIS technologies are obviously useful for many applications in the humanities. Teaching “GIS” on the base of, say, ArcGIS served the immediate needs well, but became quite irrelevant for many “immediate” needs as soon as Google Maps arrived. However, when you look not at what the present technology allows, but what technology adapted to the specific needs of the humanities should allow, you soon get into problems like spatial timeline presentations, where the administrative/political units used for mapping change their spatial covering over the years, in some areas in quite tricky ways. Solving that problem goes well beyond the typical three-year project, but when you learn about the specificity of that in one technical environment, you are in a much better position to solve the problem when another such environment becomes more convenient. And there is no reason to assume that the local geography department will be interested in that problem just for the sake of the historians. This is a general problem of attempts to transfer the teaching of matters digital to other departments with agendas of their own, which also relates therefore to information science and library science researchers. They frequently support the notion that, as humanities researchers need digital libraries, researchers interested in the digital humanities should just take some courses offered by the Information Science Department.

4. Nothing will change until some solid terms of reference are established.

   So will we have to continue to watch local implementations of degree programs in “digital X,” which after some years fade away while their original enthusiastic and sometimes exuberant proponents get either settled within the traditional structures or drop out from academia and their experience is lost in both cases to the next generation?

   As long as the vicious mechanism “to get my local program started, I must not be hampered by any framework that hinders the compromises I have to make” working towards “as my local program derives its value not from itself, but from its usefulness to others, those others may find it eventually even more useful to abolish it” continues, I’m afraid the groundhog will remain the heraldic device of the digital humanities.

   You may have noticed that I have written many more times about “digital X” rather than “digital humanities.” This is for the simple reason that the digital humanities as they present themselves today are in my opinion a chimera. This may seem surprising from the person who wrote two of the chapters responsible for defining the digital humanities in the most widely used German textbook for them (Thaller, “Geschichte der Digital Humanities”). The contradiction is simple: the authors contributing to that volume are far from the ability or willingness to define the field clearly or give clear definitions what a curriculum of the field must contain. But having been written by the people responsible for five to ten of the better-established graduate programs in Germany, at least a shadowy de facto definition of the commonalities between these programs emerges from it. This in my opinion is not enough, but it is a start.

   The big tent of the digital humanities at large, on the other hand, provides a very cozy climate to meet and greet friendly people. Any description of a field or fields that can be taught consistently it provides not.

   “Digital humanities is not about defining, but about doing” sounds wonderful and it warms your heart as it implies that whatsoever you are doing, you are a or possibly the central part of this big friendly crowd. Somehow “digital humanities is what we have decided to teach” is less convincing—at least to outsiders.

   As long as you are defining the justification of your degree course as some service to one of the established disciplines—even if the content you choose is the most revolutionary available—you depend on the whims of that discipline. Only if we manage to define an agenda that can meaningfully claim to be of such generality that it deserves to have people trained in it systematically, even if at the moment nobody else at the faculty profits directly from it, will we reach continuity and stability. An agenda concrete enough that it can be translated into practical administrative requirements, not another manifesto raising the spirit.

   My first thesis started with the claim that very few DH degrees are established due to an intrinsic epistemic interest in “the field.” The quotes around “the field” should indicate that it is unclear what “the field” consists of. Indeed between some of the different brands of presentations at a typical digital humanities conference there is such a great distance, that it is hard to find any epistemic or methodological commonalities between them, the warm embrace offered to both by a friendly community notwithstanding.

   Between “digital X” and the “digital humanities” there should be room enough under the big tent for more than one definition of what a curriculum for a field consistent in itself should contain as a minimum. And one can only hope that we start realizing that the long-term advantages of embedding your graduate program into the more widely accepted framework of a recognized curriculum outweigh the short-term inconveniences of having to fit into such a framework. The warmth and coziness of an exuberant wide tent you can share, nevertheless. Just when it comes to serious work, move into a smaller plain seminar room.

   “A degree in digital humanities”: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Alice was unconvinced. So am I.

Notes

1. 1. These courses were announced under the heading “New Courses Established” in Computers and the Humanities 3, nos. 3, 4, and 5 (1969) and 4, no. 1 (1969) and no. 3 (1970).

2. 2. On their activities after my time—I retired in 2015—see the homepage of the working group on the activities of the “Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum” or DHd, the German equivalent of the Association for Computing and the Humanities, which is available at http://dig-hum.de/ag-referenzcurriculum-digital-humanities, accessed April 9, 2024.

3. 3. The theses reflect my personal experiences. For records of similar ones, Cordell, “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities” and Kirschenbaum, “What Is ‘Digital Humanities’” are good starting points.

4. 4. This kind of dance can be performed on rather high levels. I once had the honor of participating in a small group that was exploring the feasibility of a framework for a European MA on digital preservation, answering an initiative from one of the directorate-generals (= ministries) of the European Union, an initiative vaguely smelling of money. The group included people from quite different disciplines, one of them a computer scientist, another a proponent of library science, both very sensitive to that smell and both focused on the feasibility of collecting funding for an implementation at their respective home universities. Unfortunately, both were rarely present at the same time. As a result, after each meeting that included the representative of computer science, we had a draft of a curriculum that included a major part of the first two years of a computer science BA. After every meeting with the representative of library science, we had watered that down very much to the “you just have to understand enough about it to talk to the technical people” approach from 1970 quoted above. It was a beautiful dance in its way; after three or four rounds, for some reason, the representative of the commission (roughly, the European administration) lost interest.

   One can perform this dance on much lower levels as well. That entering a temporary job in academia is much easier with some “digital knowledge” than without I consider to be as true today as it was when I started myself. If one has, so I observe, any technical knowledge at all within a humanities subject, it was and is always relatively easy to get a first job. There was and is almost always somebody who is looking for a “technician” who could do what is not easy for humanists to learn themselves. And for a distinguished member of the department, the young graduates who have read the manual of precisely one program can do magical things, which definitely qualify them as technicians, even if for reasons of politeness they are referred to as esteemed colleagues.

   A first job. That by being hired to perform what is somewhere below the dignity of a true humanist one is implicitly disqualified from any real job should be obvious. But it is not so obvious for young researchers who enthusiastically find themselves embedded in seemingly central roles in their first research team. Five to ten years later, they are the ones raising their voices at digital humanities conferences with the sharp critique that it is extremely difficult to get into more permanent positions and the higher strata of the academic staff scheme. While five to ten years earlier they have usually been the most insistent that “just doing it” was much more important than discussing what “it” consisted of.

   As staff who have begun their positions based upon a relatively narrow qualification are usually those who are most strongly motivated to work for the implementation of a degree course that depends on their qualification, they are obviously interested in ensuring that that qualification is central to the curriculum and not overshadowed.

   What I describe is visible in the great reluctance to define the levels of knowledge a specialist in “digital X” should have within the fields of competence chosen. Consequently, the qualification to be awarded by a course training such specialists is usually vague, which frequently leads to some types of magical thinking and name calling, highly destructive on the project and research level but also damaging for what one can expect from somebody having a “digital X” degree and what the long-term chances of survival are for such a degree program.

   I had the honor a few years ago to act as a reviewer of a funding line in the “digital humanities.” Some time ago, the final reports started to trickle in, and a few had been accepted among other reasons “because all appropriate standards are recognized and applied.” I was less than happy to read in one of the final reports that the promised results could not be delivered, as “applying the TEI was much more complicated than they had learned to believe.” Another report containing a similar phrase with the TEI replaced by CIDOC/CRM did not increase my happiness. If the specialists consulted by the people who drew up these applications had emphasized that to apply these standards needed some serious training and work, the magical thinking that following the standard would solve all problems could have been avoided.

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