It seems astonishing that anyone would think that a facsimile--even a stunningly good color digital image is anything but a starting point from which work on an electronic edition could proceed (on the understanding that the original will be visited at some point in the process).

An image does not self-analyze any more than an original does, so delivery of linked color images is only a small part of an electronic edition of a manuscript.

I, too, certainly become discouraged by the labor-intensive quality of some forms of markup, but this is in no way to say that they are obsolete.  Rather, they are in need of adaptable GUI tools that allow faster pointing and clicking.  I use NoteTab Pro for this work currently because it is cheap, reliable and adaptable on the fly at a very basic level, but I'd love something that really was as fast, versatile and convenient as Dreamweaver, with its available split-screen code+result view, each of those views directly editable.

Heck, I'd probably even pay good money for it.  As a user of Dreamweaver for some web site projects (of the time is money sort), I haven't yet found anything like it for our much more strictly ordered TEI/XML work, nor am I in a position to write anything myself.

Humanities computing on the part of the humanist is certainly the road less travelled, and this is doubtless not only because of technophobia, but also because of the vast amount of "extra" work involved.  In my program in medieval English literature at the University of Virginia, I already had to learn more than one "extra" language (Old English, Latin, and one other medieval vernacular) in addition to the standard modern language requirement in place for people working in periods later than medieval. 

Then I had to learn textual criticism and finally humanities computing, the latter pretty much on-the-fly.

Two qualities were needed for this endeavor: Stubbornness (congenital, no problem) and a special hybrid of shamelessness and humility that has taken me years to develop and which is still a bit of a struggle every time I come into the presence of real computer scientists such as those at the annual TEI Members' Meeting with my pathetic little bit of "kung fu."

Will they laugh, or will they help me out?  Is my current work ultimately just one big digital boner, perpetrated by a rank amateur who never had any business meddling in the field anyway, or a nifty combination of textual criticism and digital technology?  An Caltech Ph.D. I ain't, so I don't have much of an answer to these questions most of the time.  I have to arrange not to care.  Thus, the virtue of shamelessness, essential to what I call the medium-tech scholar.

What I do have to do, like everyone else in my position, is constantly learn new technology, usually on my own from four of five books, or with a few hours tutoring from a generous tech on the side (Bless them!  Bless them!)--all of it while somehow maintaining my status as a literary scholar, a bit of a Latinist, a codicologist...

[Yes, I do find there is a constant element of flim-flam involved in survival as a digital medievalist, in that you have to explain  to non-techs why everything takes you longer (time to learn the technology) and to the techs why you are so profoundly ignorant (time to learn the humanities angle).]

It seems to me that we all have to be ambassadors of technology to humanists who may well have gotten into their humanism in part because of math-phobia and/or a related technophobia.  Me, I wrote my first program on a Commodore 64 and yes, it was in my parents' basement, as was the chemistry equipment that Dad gave me for Christmas.  The telescope was kept upstairs, because you couldn't get much of a shot at the sky otherwise.  The oddity is that I then swerved over into what my family thinks of as "professional story reading."

Most potential recruits to digital humanities do not have this early technophile profile.  Some may not even know what duct tape is, either literally or figuratively.

With such as these, we need to foreground the playful aspect of our work.  It _is_ fun, but they do not see how, nor do they see how they could be having fun in that particular way.  It is possible, however, to present the thin end of the wedge here, and also to present more drinks and hors d'oeuvres at special open house sessions at humanities conferences.  And back at the home institution, it is also possible to con people into collaboration, sharing your expertise with them, and getting a bit of theirs as well.  Get together.  Share food and drink and an interest in _their_ work, without mentioning yours much, except to brainstorm occasionally about what a splendid multimedia project their work could be turned into.  Have them seeing The Vision before you have them seeing the angle brackets.

Humanities computing could be the driving force behind interdisciplinarity, and a lot of really fun collegiality if we wanted it to be.

There will always be work for which our technologies are not particularly useful--or at last not specially or crucially useful.  They can always be applied to almost any intellectual work as an efficient display and delivery tool, or add multimedia presentations that very greatly enhance a more "traditional" form of humanities work that does not in itself depend on digital analysis, but only some kinds of humanities work--that which is at least somewhat quantifiable--can be taken to where the digitization becomes the very heart of the matter.  (I bet someone will jump on that.)

I'd say, any digital humanist who has not done any 100% non-digital work recently should probably do so at his or her earliest convenience.  Send in a proposal for a paper in an entirely non-digital literary, history or art history conference.  It can be a means of re-establishing contact with potential digital humanists, but it is certainly also as good a mental  exercise for us as a little digitization is for the non-technical humanist.

I speak from experience. 8-)

PRB