Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 258.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 09:19:54 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: methodological primitives?
Suppose that we look at any traditional academic field solely from the
perspective of humanities computing. What we'd see, I'd guess, is data on
the one hand and a set of mechanical operations ordinarily applied to them
on the other. I'd like to ask here about those operations, how we define
them, what they are in relation to algorithms at the low-level end and
application programs at the high-level.
I'll call these mechanical operations "methodological primitives" and
define the type as "an algorithmically specifiable transformation of data
that forms a recognisable component of multiple scholarly processes". As an
idea I would suppose the type to be a useful analytic tool with which to
resolve what humanists do into a loosely bounded set of interoperable
software components which could be assembled in whatever order by a scholar
in order to aid his or her research.
I'd suppose that alphanumeric sorting, compiling a frequency list of
word-forms and lemmatising the word-forms of an inflected language would be
examples at the lower-level end. At the upper would be concording a text --
here the difference between a primitive and an ordinary program, such as
MonoConc, would be the modular design.
My question is, how strong is the idea of methodological primitives? How
useful? Is this a direction in which we should go?
Yours,
WM
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
voice: +44 (0)20 7848 2784 fax: +44 (0)20 7848 5081
<Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> <http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/>
maui gratias agere
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