User:JosebaAbaitua/sandbox/References/DHum2021/GARCÍA ITURROSPE, Iván

The wider question to address, then, is what needs the humanities community has that can be dealt with using DH tools and techniques, or equivalently what incentive humanists have to take up and to use new methods. This can be treated in some respects like the computational quest for the ‘killer application’—a need of the user group that can be filled, and by filling it, create an acceptance of that tool and the supporting methods/results. Digital humanities need a ‘killer application.’

‘Killer application’ is a term borrowed from the discipline of computer science. In its strictest form, it refers to an application program so useful that users are willing to buy the hardware it runs on, just to have that program. One of the earliest examples of such an application was the spreadsheet, as typified by VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Having a spreadsheet made business decision making so much easier (and more accurate and profitable) that businesses were willing to buy the computers (Apple IIs or IBM PCs, respectively) just to run spreadsheets. Gamers by the thousands have bought Xbox gaming consoles just to run Halo. A killer application is one that will make you buy, not just the product itself, but also invest in the necessary infrastructure to make the product useful.

For digital humanities, this term should be interpreted in a somewhat broader sense. Any intellectual product—a computer program, an abstract tool, a theory, an analytic framework—can and should be evaluated in terms of the ‘affordances’ ; it creates. In this framework, an ‘affordance’ is simply ‘an opportunity for action’ ; spreadsheets, for instance, create opportunities to make business decisions quickly on the basis of incomplete or hypothesized data, while Halo creates the opportunity for playing a particular game. Ruecker provides a framework for comparing different tools in terms of their ‘affordance strength,’ essentially the value offered by the affordances of a specific tool.