The arrival of digital humanities in my own research field has also changed methods of communication. Lately, one of the most central communication media has become the IRC channel, which I last used as a teenager. Social media is nothing compared to traditional IRC, you know, and humanities researchers have yet to really internalise this.

At the moment, IRC is one of my central channels for fast-paced research collaboration where it does not matter if the participants are scattered all over Europe. We’ve been using IRC also during the night and at the weekend, especially last winter, because my most important cooperation partner, Leo Lahti, still has an official day job in biosciences.

As of late, I have been seen with a laptop on my lap most evenings and nights. After watching me do this this around Christmas time, my 13-year-old finally asking me, a little reluctantly, what we were actually doing every night and weekend. I excitedly started explaining how we were solving a very interesting problem on how early-modern paper consumption in the printing industry can be studied on the basis of the history of books and using modern statistical computer-aided methods. This still makes my son laugh – dad is revolutionising the way we count paper. It was only then that I realised that from a teenager’s perspective I wasn’t only nearing 40 and becoming one of those grandpas who wore Speedo swimming trunks, but I was apparently also a nerd.