Mark Olsen and Shlomo Argamon have just published a viewpoint in the Communications of the ACM titled, “Toward meaningful computing” that argues, (among other things)
Current initiatives by Google, Yahoo, and a consortium of European research institutions to digitize the holdings of major research libraries worldwide promise to make the world’s knowledge accessible as never before. Yet in order to completely realize this promise, computer scientists must still develop systems that deal effectively with meaning, not just with data and information. This grand research and development challenge motivates our call here to improve collaboration between computer scientists and scholars in the humanities.
They set an ambitious, but I think, doable agenda for us.