Jan Baetens to Joe Tabbi

“Dear Joe, hello. This is Jan Baetens from Leuven in Belgium. It is my great, great, pleasure to congratulate you on your retirement. You may know that I, myself, retired two years ago, and I was always convinced that you were at least 20, if not 30 years younger than I am. So, for me, it was an enormous surprise to discover that we are now partners in crime. I hope you will enjoy your retirement as much as I do, but I have to warn you already: as a retired professor, you will have even less time than before.

Nevertheless, beyond congratulating you on your retirement, I would also like to express some words of thanks for everything you have meant and continue to mean to me as a scholar, but also an editor, a critic, a reader, and above all, a digital humanist. You represent, for me, what is the ideal today of Digital Humanities, namely: a kind of creative mix among the traditional humanities. You are a wonderful close reader. You are a scholar who is incredibly attentive to all the things that are also most important to me: the cognitive dimension of literary texts, the interaction between text and image, and so on. You manage to blend these observations in a very organic, natural way with all the affordances, challenges, possibilities, and achievements of the digital turn. You have done it from the very beginning with electronic book review. And I can’t repeat enough how important the electronic book review has been for me and continues to be for me.

For me, it’s not just a key journal, but a key site in the field, not just in the digital humanities, but in the field of humanities and art and science studies in general. These same qualities found in ebr are also exemplified in the rest of your work. And it’s not just me who says this. I can guarantee you that all the students and the colleagues to whom I’ve consistently recommended reading your work join in the same acknowledgement, recognition and gratitude for everything that you have done — for me, for us, for all those interested and working in that amazingly broad (and nevertheless workable, thanks to you) field of digital studies. Many thanks for that, and enjoy your retirement!”