Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 354.
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: Sat, 14 Oct 2000 12:08:00 +0100
From: Geoffrey Rockwell <grockwel@mcmaster.ca>
Subject: Methods
Dear Willard,
Imust admit to finding myself torn on the issue of methods. The old style
e-text humanist in me likes the idea of methods. When a community develops
a consensus about methods it allows us to not have to recapitulate the
reasons for trying something everytime we want to share a result. It also
allows us to develop tools built on this consensus and get on with the job
of studying texts.
On the other hand, the new media humanist in me can't see anything like a
method applying unless one were to look at ethnographic methods for
assessing human computer interface. I note that in "Computing in Humanities
Education; A European Perspective" multimedia is relegated to "didactic
methods" - section 2.5. Relegated is perhaps too strong (and it is not fair
that I pick on this excellent work), but there doesn't seem to be a place
for multimedia as form of creative expression - instead the book outlines a
view to the effect that humanities computing is about text-analysis,
computational linguistics and their methods while multimedia is for
teaching. Where are the new media programmes in Europe? What is happening
in the art and design schools? Are we willing to exile the arts (which have
a different relationship to method called technique) from the humanities in
order to have a tidy "human science" paradigm?
Yours,
Geoffrey Rockwell
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 10/14/00 EDT