• Inexpensive disk storage makes large-scale projects possible.
• These projects, because of their size, tend to become collaborative and, because of their scope, interdisciplinary.
• Market forces disperse the specialists, but the network facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration in nearly real time.

This kind of work is already being done, by groups of humanities scholars:

• H-Net
• Stoa
• The Blake Archive
• Seenet

by humanities scholars and librarians:

• Whitman IMLS
• Supporting Digital Scholarship

and even across the "two cultures" of computer science and the humanities:

• Virtual Harlem
• Virtual Vaudeville
• Amiens Cathedral
• The Crystal Palace
• Evolutionary Infrastructure

Many electronic editions and many journals are, of course, collaborative. Some are also interdisciplinary. But this category of work also encompasses completely new genres of born-digital scholarship. Arguably, it is the way the humanities will be done, in the new century. If we can tackle large problems, with the resources of the computer, the network, and interdisciplinary collaboration, then stand-alone, single-author work on smaller problems is eventually going to seem ... quaint.