Today it’s very easy to say that you work in Digital Humanities. There are conferences, funding calls, departments and publications about this field, and nobody close to the Humanities will have a problem acknowledging that Digital Humanities are in vogue. But this hasn’t always been the case. In the early 1990s, the admin staff at the Department of History where I used to work was puzzled as to why we would need to buy computers. In this post, I’m going to tell you about my professional journey over the last 30 years, which is also the history of important changes in the science system of Spain and elsewhere.I got my BSc in Fundamental Biology in Santiago de Compostela in 1990. I was interested in biochemistry, genetics and cell metabolism. At the same time, I was fascinated by computers, which had become popular in Spain a few years before. Such was the case that I began self-teaching myself computer programming. In 1989, still at uni, I developed a software system to acquire, process and visualise data from fish in fish farms, and it was then when I discovered the possibilities and power of applying computers to different fields, such as biology in my case. Together with some classmates, I started a company devoted to data processing in ecology, which only lasted for a few months but taught us valuable lessons. When I saw the announcement of an MSc in Applied Electronics at the Escuela de Organización Industrial in Madrid, just two months after obtaining my BSc, I didn’t hesitate and enrolled immediately. There I had the chance to learn programming, systems architecture and software engineering in a regulated manner. I bought and devoured over a hundred books on the subject, and started to think about how to apply this new knowledge to interesting problems. Once I finished my MSc, in 1992, I came back to Santiago de Compostela, where a friend suggested that I contacted a small group at the Department of History at the local university, because they were seeking a computer specialist. I talked to a young Felipe Criado Boado, group director, and I was positively surprised that a Humanities Department, something quite alien to me at the time, hosted such interest and awareness about the importance of computerising their methodologies and work techniques. I began working for them as a computer technician, but before one year had passes, they had persuaded me to start asking research questions on the application of digital technologies to archaeology. I must say that my contact with the Humanities, which happened through direct and merciless immersion in a Department full of humanists with a blatant post-modern penchant, was brutal but greatly fruitful. The differences between the epistemology that I was bringing with me (as a biologist and computer specialist) and that reigning in the Department were many and large, but I soon observed that both profited deeply from this contact and hybridisation. When, in 1995, Felipe Criado asked me to embark on a PhD thesis on computer applications in archaeology, I realised that trans-disciplinary research was the only way in which the state of the art could be advanced simultaneously in archaeology and computing.I defended my thesis in 2000, and got a job as a systems analyst in the regional Government. That was the only way I found to have some income and get plenty of time to further my education in the evenings. I managed to get a degree in computing from The Open University and develop the Archaeological Information System (SIA+), a software tool that would be used by more than 100 people over 25 years, and which still works today, albeit hardly. About that time, I started a company under the umbrella of the University of Santiago de Compostela, which was selected to received free support and business advice. The goal of the company was to sell SIA+ and other research outcomes related to archaeological computing. We failed, but we managed to lead two research and innovation projects about software and Humanities, and developed the OPEN/Metis methodology, which we still use today.In late 2011, Brian Henderson-Sellers, director of a world-renowned research group in software engineering, contacted me from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), in Australia, and invited me to apply for a post-doctoral position that they had just announced, as our advances in software development methodologies matched closely what they were looking for. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to take the gamble and applied for the job. I got it, so I left my company in the hands of a colleague and moved to Sydney. There I invented the “powertype pattern”, a conceptual device that later worked as a basis for the ISO/IEC 24744 international standard for development methodologies, which I co-edited with Brian. I spent four years at UTS, doing excellence research in development methodologies, multiagent systems and process improvement. My partner was working at the New South Wales Heritage Office at the time, so I managed to test and validate some of my advances by applying them to heritage-related issues. In this manner, I was able to stay close to the Humanities while carrying out research in engineering.In 2005 I was contacted from the European Software Institute in Bilbao, a private foundation today part of Tecnalia. They offered me a job as research projects lead. Since Australia was starting to suffer a strong economic crisis, I decided to take it, and I spent two years in Bilbao conceiving, designing and leading research projects in software engineering. I developed a good network of contacts across Europe and the world, and I gained very valuable experiences in the organisation and management of large, distributed teams. I also continued my voluntary work at ISO, the International Organisation for Standardisation, being a delegate from AENOR (later UNE), the Spanish body for standards.In mid-2007, however, and for personal reasons, I moved back to Santiago de Compostela, where I used a few months between jobs to write and publish a book on metamodelling, together with my former boss Brian Henderson-Sellers. Later that year, a Staff Scientist position was announced at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in the area of computer applications in archaeology, which showed the increasing relevance of Digital Humanities. I got the job and joined CSIC in 2008.During my initial years as a CSIC staff I focused on developing a material infrastructure and associated resources for the work I was planning to tackle: to develop the necessary theories, methodologies and technologies to understand how knowledge about cultural heritage is generated and communicated. I started a virtualised Computing Lab and supervised a small group of software developers to build some initial tools. Around 2012, Digital Humanities start becoming popular in the fields of cultural heritage and archaeology. The Computer Applications in Archaeology (CAA) association, which I knew since 1997 through their annual meetings, elects me as a member of their steering committee during the Beijing 2011 conference, and I begin to get involved in the management and promotion of research in Digital Humanities in a direct and more intense manner.In 2014 we start the MARIOL “Heritage 2.0: Abstract Reference Models for Information in Cultural Heritage” project, funded by a grant from the Spanish Plan Nacional de I+D+i. This project produced two of the most important research outcomes of the last few years: the CHARM (Cultural Heritage Abstract Reference Model) ontology and the ConML conceptual modelling language, which is especially oriented towards the Humanities and Social Sciences. These two outcomes have worked since as infrastructures for many other developments. For example, the KaleidoScapes cultural heritage educational system for secondary school students is based on them, as well as the more recent projects ACME “Heritage 3.0: Argument and Conceptual Modelling for the Improvement of Cultural Heritage Participation and Management Policies”, funded by the Spanish Research Agency and centred on the argumentation analysis of heritage discourses; or “COVID19 in Spanish: Inter-Disciplinary Research on the Terminology, Themes and Communication of Science”, funded by the Presidency of CSIC.In addition to this line of research, focused on representing knowledge about heritage, I keep a second line related to development methodologies. In this regard, we have developed a repository of methodological knowledge for archaeology by studying the techniques and approaches of various European organisations working in this field, as part of the ARIADNE “Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe” project funded by FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES. We have also created the first software implementation in the Humanities of the ISO/IEC 24744 international standard by developing Cabila, a “game” for the collaborative generation of knowledge related to social practices, as part of the “Cultural Heritage of the Galicia-Northern Portugal Euro-Region: Valorisation and Innovation”, funded by EP-INTERREG V.On the course of these works, in 2019 I was elected a member of the steering committee of the Sociedad Internacional de Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas, and vice-president since 2021. I have also been named managing editor of the Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, and president of Círculo Escéptico, a Spanish NGO devoted to the promotion of critical thinking and scientific culture. All this wouldn’t have been possible without the support of a network of colleagues and collaborators that work with me regularly: Patricia, Martín, Beatriz, Leticia, Maria Elena and others are also responsible for the journey that I describe here.My current objectives focus on the development of a cultural heritage argumentative knowledge mesh, which will allow us to understand how different agents reason about heritage, how what we consider heritage becomes so, and how these discourses are maintained, criticised and altered over time. To achieve this goal, and in addition to using existing technologies such as ConML or CHARM, we are developing a new theoretical and methodological apparatus, tentatively named IAT/ML, as well as some software tools, that will let us connect discourses with a representation of the world that they refer to, in order to carry out a rigorous and powerful inter-textual analysis.I arrived in the world of the Humanities from Computing, and this makes me an uncommon researcher, because most of those who work in Digital Humanities have a humanistic background complemented with some additional training in digital technologies. My situation is the opposite. Over 30 years, I have tried to contribute my knowledge and experience in software engineering to humanistic knowledge, and along this process I have witnessed both the Humanities and software engineering advancing hand on hand and each thanks to the other. It is evident that combining different academic fields is necessary for them benefit from trans-disciplinarity. But it is not as evident that this is especially so when these fields are radically different in relation to their worldviews. Only in this manner we can recoup the large investment, both personal and institutional, that is needed for trans-disciplinary research, because only in this manner each discipline is enriched by viewpoints, experiences and knowledge that otherwise would remain completely foreign and unreachable.[Diagram by Claire Padovani]