Toward Meaningful Computing makes the case for Humanities Computing to work closely with the Computer Sciences, to help teach computers to understand meaning in data. However, such is view is problematic for a number of reasons. Primarily, it assumes that computers can come to understand meaning in an encompassing way. The premise, then, begins to sound like this: computer scientists have hit a wall in their quest to answer all of life’s answers through binary, and digital humanists are needed to provide the secret recipe of human-encoded meaning, so that computer scientists can go on with their job.

Does that sound troublesome to you? It certainly does to me.