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A Roadmap for Humanists in the Computing World: A Summary of Humanities
Computing
by Willard McCarty
Humanities Computing is an intellectual manifesto for a computing practice
that is of as well as in and for the humanities and interpretative social
sciences.
1. Historical background to the project.
Although the application of computers to cultural artefacts
is nearly coeval with the invention of the physical machine, our realisation
of its identity as a semi-autonomous scholarly pursuit is quite recent.
During the first half-century of humanities computing, disciplinary turf-polity
and its institutional enforcement have kept the practice largely in the
role of handmaiden to conventional research. Conceived as no more than
a means to an end – the operative phrase is “just a tool” – computing
has tended at best to appear as a footnote or afterthought to scholarship.
The vigorous growth of computer science meanwhile has not helped directly,
since the focus of that field and of the philosophical commentary on
it has been ruled by computational theory, whose concern (as Peter Denning
put it) orbits the question, “What can be automated?” The
humanities are rather focused on what cannot.
Institutionally, humanities computing has passed through these overlapping
stages, which reflect its changing identity:
1. isolated researchers, both in conventional academic departments and
in the academic demimonde, communicating through lists of “scholars
active”, newsletters, journals, heroic attempts at unified bibliographies,
the occasional conference and electronic discussion groups (such as Humanist);
2. computing centre help-desks, specialised units within these centres
and independent non-academic service departments (sometimes staffed by
those with doctoral degrees in the humanities);
3. academic appointments within conventional departments first tolerant
of, now more often encouraging specialisation in humanities
computing;
4. academic appointments directly in humanities computing, though located
in conventional departments;
5. academic departments of humanities computing, with their own academic
appointments, teaching programmes and academic-related research
staff.
The trajectory from handmaiden to peer, or slave to co-worker, seems
indisputable, although at the moment there are too few of the last kind
to draw any firm conclusions on the evidence of institutional development
alone. But what is the work?
2. The argument
The work: this is the question with which Humanities Computing is primarily concerned. It does not argue from the history of institutions,
rather from one scholar’s experience as helper, researcher, observer
and collaborator. It engages philosophical, historical, ethnographic,
critical and technical perspectives from across the disciplines of the
humanities to make sense of experience gained from direct participation
in the first, second and fifth of the stages listed above. It forswears
the “Real Soon Now” promises of techno-enthusiasm to ask
from the perspectives of the humanities, What can we learn now, from
current tools, methods and results, about a computing of the humanities?
What can we learn about the humanities from the computings we know?
The trajectory I have suggested might seem to imply the emergence of a new
discipline, but in the book I argue strongly against such an attempt. Historically
the field has arisen as a collective, collaborative response to a situation
common throughout the academy. At its core are an emergent set of methods derived
from many disciplines, including computer science – a process not yet
(if ever) complete, as connections with them are being discovered or made.
As a purely methodological practice related to all the disciplines in its purview,
working by nature across and with them, humanities computing cannot be simply
another discipline. Rather, I argue, it is a scholarly though extra-disciplinary
activity, by nature semi-autonomous and collaborative.
3. Chapter summaries
Apart from the Introduction, Humanities Computing has five chapters, as follows.
Chapter 1, “Modelling”, derives from philosophy, especially the
phenomenology of Heidegger and Polanyi, and from the philosophy of science,
a way of thinking about the role of equipment in the making of knowledge. It
proceeds from the indefinitely plastic nature of Alan Turing’s scheme,
which allows us to model our ideas of objects or processes in the world, and
by comparing model to idea, to learn more about the latter. It argues that
the essential mutability of computing foregrounds the manipulability of the
models we construct with it, hence that modelling is the semantic lemma that
best identifies its essence for analytic work. It also argues from the twin
imperatives of computational representation – complete explicitness and
absolute consistency – that the gulf between object and model is a permanent
if progressively changing fact and a cornucopia of insights into the artefacts
we model.
Chapter 2, “Genre”, addresses the synthetic side of humanities
computing – its building of scholarly reference works and resources,
and the developing idea of the library that contains, organizes and gives access
to them. I take as my example the commentary form, and as an historical instance
of it, a single passage from E. R. Dodds’ commentary on the Bacchae of
Euripides. The rhetorical subtleties of this passage clearly demonstrate the
skillful use of both the powers and constraints of the printed medium, with
effects we do not yet have the means to imitate in hypertext. The point is
not to argue that such imitation should be attempted, rather to spur the development
of tools and to underscore the necessity for an historical analysis of the
inherited genres. The chapter surveys current work in digital library research,
emphasizing the difficulties of interoperability, the limits of metadata and
the surprising effectiveness of Google and its ilk. The chapter puts forth
the idea of the DIY (do-it-yourself) commentary as a model for the future work
a digital library will somehow need to support.
Chapter 3, “Discipline”, considers ways of conceptualizing the
disciplinary landscape in which humanities computing makes its way, what sort
of an entity it is and how it interrelates with the established fields. As
the first chapter was primarily philosophical and the second historical, this
one is ethnographic. Its central argument is that humanities computing is to
the disciplines as the anthropological participant-observer is to the cultures
he or she studies – both motivated by deep and respectful curiosity.
Close attention is paid to the vocabulary of disciplinarity and the epistemic
metaphors it invokes. Alternative figures of thought are suggested – ones
that avoid the common turf-polity of academia, which excludes the kind of thing
humanities computing is. An ethnographic method of analysis focusing on disciplinary
tropes and imageries of explanation is recommended for the investigative work
by which humanities computing establishes connections with the epistemic island
cultures in its purview. The term “theory” is examined across the
disciplines, from the physical sciences to the humanities, to exemplify the
kind of analysis I recommend. A graphical map of humanities computing in relation
to the disciplines is used to explicate two kinds of relationship: application,
where practitioners interact with scholars in collaborative projects, and research,
in which they study, extract and adapt methods from the related disciplines.
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