Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 396.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com> (72)
Subject: Re: 14.0387 primitives, argumentation, evidence
[2] From: Randall Pierce <rpierce@jsucc.jsu.edu> (5)
Subject: Re: 14.0387 primitives, argumentation, evidence
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Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 06:52:58 +0100
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com>
Subject: Re: 14.0387 primitives, argumentation, evidence
Hi Francois,
What an amazing post. Ably defended, and I have to agree with everything
you're saying. I'm also struck by your linking of our recent thread on
methodological primitives to strategies of argumentation. Of course they
have everything to do with one another. (Just a glance at Unsworth's
categories ought to alert us to this, but somehow I missed it.)
Also satisfying because here, certainly, the mysteries start. How do we
categorize what works to bring about the shock of recognition, the faith of
shared conviction, or the stimulating provocation of a perpendicular view?
We've noted from time to time that markup seems to be an odd (displaced and
behind-scenes) species of rhetoric. Whether "encoding" is, is another
question: maybe rhetoric is a form of encoding. The notion of trope,
metaphor or metamorphosis is deeply worked up in this. Both rhetoric and
encoding seem to be tropes for "trope". This gets mixed up because of the
intimate but vexed relation, as in all poetry, between what is up front
(the "interface"?) and what is (presumed to be) behind it. The system is
generative of complexities, so that this relation itself is soon so
manifold and subtle as to become inexplicable.
I am reassured by a remark made just this morning by an independent
scholar/Humanist friend of mine who's just getting a feel for the power of
generic markup in textual editing. "You've got to get down in the
[ttranscribed] text to fix it anyway," he says, "it's never perfect. So
while you're there, you may as well put in good code: it saves you so much
work later." In his eagerness, he may be sliding over how bold and
dangerous this work is. But he is certainly right that for scholarly
production, something has to be done sometime, somehow.
I'm already on record suggesting that boiling it all down to methodological
primitives isn't going to save us any work. Call it "rhetorical primitives"
and we're talking about one of the oldest games in the book. Selection,
likening, typing, discrimination, juxtaposition. Nevertheless, it is all
definitely part of understanding what it is we do, and why we do it. That
is to say, I guess, part of that strange kind of self-erasing poetry called
"criticism".
I hope no other readers take my claiming bandwidth here to discourage them
from answering your question: "do certain patterns of presenting arguments
and evidence have an impact on the perceived feasibility and desirability
of mechanizing methods?"
Cheers,
Wendell
At 09:15 AM 10/20/00 +0100, you wrote:
>...
>The hide-and-seek primitive in subject fields, and the impulse to read a
>unidirectional syntagm off a listing, along with the method/methodology
>distinction introduced in the discussion recently and my own even more
>recent lapsus in forgetting ascii, unicode and their ilk, have alerted me
>to one of the joys of observing humanities scholars in computing action :
>the ease with which they move between instance and model.
>
>Which leads me to pick up one of Willard's themes : the nature of evidence
>and its connection to argumentation and to wonder if Willard or other
>subscribers might muse online about the relation of pursuit of primitives
>to forms of argumentation and the construction/discovery of evidence. Or
>to reverse the order: do certain patterns of presenting arguments
>and evidence have an impact on the perceived feasibility and desirability
>of mechanizing methods?
>
>
>
>--
>Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
> http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
>Member of the Evelyn Letters Project
> http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~dchamber/evelyn/evtoc.htm
======================================================================
Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
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Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 06:54:00 +0100
From: Randall Pierce <rpierce@jsucc.jsu.edu>
Subject: Re: 14.0387 primitives, argumentation, evidence
Re the exchange between Wendell Piez and Francois Lachance: Speaking
linguistically, the cognitive matrix in which arguments and evidence are
presented should be the determining factor creating perceived feasibility
of mechanizing texts. If argumentation is formed properly, it will produce
the most necessary implement in the discovery of evidence: the proper
question(s). Randall
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