As I think about the Day of Digital Humanities, my participation in 2011, and the digital humanities themselves, speaking an odd and evolving technical language of 1 and 0, I am reminded of Julio Cortazar’s short essay, Take It or Leave It, from Around the Day in 80 Worlds. In it, he likes writing to Jazz; he argues that perfection is practiced, studied, and recorded, but it is somehow not real. Life and literature, begin and end, in takes. In the improvisation–of the designer, coder, project director mashing up ideas and open API–there is magic. In that improvisation we extend, build, and energize our work. With all this recent talk about sustainability in digital humanities (guilty, as accused) one cannot help but wonder what might be lost in the quest for such permanency. Either way, if you ask me to define the digital humanities, I just might sent you to Cortazar, jazz, and improvisation.

Here are Cortazar’s words (with the caveat that I went to find these on the Internet, not from my bookshelf; they might not be quite right; but that is the improvised universe of the digital humanities.)

“Strange power of the record, which can open for us the workshop of the artist, let us attend his successes and failures. How many takes are there in the world? This edited one can’t be the best; in its turn the atom bomb could someday be the equivalent of Bird’s Hold it!, the great silence. But will there be other usable takes afterwards?

“The difference between practice and take. Practice leads little by little to perfection, what it produces doesn’t matter, it is present only as a function of the future. In the take creation contains its own criticism, so it often interrupts itself to begin again; the inadequacy or failure of a take has the value of practice for the one that follows, but the next one is not an improved version of the preceding one, rather, if it is really good, it is always another thing entirely.

“The best literature is always a take; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement.

“I don’t want to write anything but takes.”

I don’t want to digital humanities to be anything more than takes.