Information technology has revolutionized our world and our work, as small, fast, cheap and interconnected digital devices make previously unimagined innovations possible. What was once intractable and unthinkable is now mundane and can be done in the palm of the hand. Computers and information technology play an indispensable role in everyday life for people in business, corporations, the academy, government, and public service. This transformation of life and letters has already produced exciting developments in the past decade: asynchronous and real-time web communications on a global scale; the replacement of the card catalog with globally-accessible online catalogs; the preservation and replication of priceless endangered manuscripts, visual art, film, and sound through dynamic digital scanning, graphics, and storage technologies; the mapping of the human genome through the combined power of massive databases and computer networks; the advent of multimedia as essential to the undergraduate classroom and learning experience.

The power and speed of browsers and networks are exciting because they bring us valuable stores of information, allowing people to easily work with and combine text, images, numbers, audio, and video. Yet technology alone will not take us into this age. Successful technologies use rich content. Web sites, virtual environments, multi-media applications, learning simulations, computer games, all need art, words, music, choreography, and design to bring them to life. Beyond preparing students to participate in this work, universities must also addresses the fundamental ways information technologies are affecting how people do their work in humanities and social sciences. Data analysis applications, 3-d and computer modeling, global networking, simulations, all will change the ways faculty members and graduate students do their work in the Humanities and Social Sciences. New ways of doing intellectual work will be the norm.

The creative partnership between computer science and history ­ — the core of what we now call "cultural informatics" — is the cornerstone of the digital revolution. Knowledge is useless without meaning, and meaning is the essence of the humanities. Humanities technology emerged in the 1960s as an interdisciplinary effort by humanists and social scientists to harness the power of the computer for their studies. Early pioneers used computers for textual and quantitative analysis, to provide new insights and new ways to teach. The advent of the Internet and the digital revolution of the last decade, however, allowed humanities technology to come into its own. In a world where information can be reduced to bits and bytes and communicated instantaneously, humanities technology has rapidly emerged as a necessary and fundamentally interdisciplinary method of archiving and interpreting human activity and the human record. Humanities technology can, for the first time in world history, securely preserve and provide broad democratic access to the documents, images, languages, sound, and film that constitute the human record and facilitate its understanding.

Over the years, MATRIX has collaborated on digital projects with a number of faculty members, museums, libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions and has been a key part of the digital humanities revolution. Cultural informatics will remain one of MATRIX¹ primary research and development areas.