Of course, the irony in this emphasis on building is that if building tools is a form of scholarship, then scholarship risks being outsourced to the very tools scholars build. Ramsay and Rockwell identify a fear brewing amongst humanities scholars that scholarly work will become automated, its processes black-boxed, and in turn its work yet again reduced to its output. Yet, as these scholars also note: “the separation between writing, conceiving, and transforming is hardly clear-cut” (82). Which is to say: it is nearly impossible or—perhaps more aptly put—irresponsible to sever process from product. Yet this split is precisely what happens when the processes of how something is made become opaque or readable by only experts or computers.

This issue once again raises the larger question of how to evaluate any humanities scholarship in a market-driven culture, one which is increasingly more sympathetic to the sciences due to the measurable output and usability of their work. In this sense, building as a mode of scholarship provides both a threat and a solution. In many ways, it may have the effect of encouraging the humanities to pay closer attention to the processes which make scholarly work possible, all the while threatening to reduce these processes (which—as Ramsay and Rockwell point out—quickly become opaque with the use of computers) to the results they produce.

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