Bill Wulf began by suggesting
simulation of society and human behavior to transform humanities research. I think this is
premature; once at NSF I asked if we should try for a total
simulation of the worm "C. elegans" and couldn''t get agreement on whether we were ready for that. Even a guinea pig is way out of reach; after we can do that, we can work our way through the animal kingdom to a Second Trombone.
Janet Murray explored styles of cooperation between humanities and computer science, rejecting most of them as inadequately close or fair, and discussing the abilities of computers to create interactive media in which choices made lead to different outcomes. I couldn''t really see this as an advance over plays like Alan Ayckbourn''s "Intimate Exchanges" or the movie "Sliding Doors", unless there are authorship tools making this widely accessible. Personally I''m always hesitant about complex multimedia presentation systems since they tend to require too many skills and/or too much capital investment for an
individual to be able to use them, and thus hampering the ability of one creative individual to produce something. There are very few people who can excel at both the narrative and visual arts (Blake, Rossetti, and William Morris come to mind, but they are unusual).