Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 405.
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: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 07:48:42 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: de planctu
Dear colleagues:
For the past several weeks I have been attempting to do what I think
scholars in the humanities regularly do, or at least what I've done
numerous times: look into a field in which I was not trained, dig around
and follow the trails left by references, spot the papers/books that
recurrently turn up, read everything I can get my hands on, then finally
summarise the results for a fat footnote or paragraph in an essay that
needs to recognise a direction, define what it is, but not follow it. This
is the first time, however, that a majority of the research has been
online. That in itself is an interesting and, I think, significant story,
but it's not the one I'm writing about. I wish to complain, in the hopes
that some kind if irritated soul will tell me I'm all wrong, that if I'd
only looked at X or Y I'd not have had to make such a fuss, and perhaps a
fool of myself. So be it. I'm into taking risks like that. But this time I
really don't think it's much of a risk.
A few weeks ago I decided I had to find out about what was happening in
hypertext research. I don't mean the literary critical take on hypertext a
la Landow et al. or what's been done in and on hypertext fiction, for which
see Eastgate Systems, <http://www.eastgate.com/>. Rather in attempting to
model sophisticated referential gestures in scholarly and traditional
exegetical prose -- such as explicated by Steven Fraade in his brilliant
study, From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and Its Interpretation in the
Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy -- I decided that I needed to know what the
hypertext folks in computer science had thought about links, nodes and
related topics. After a considerable amount of effort I have turned up
about 50 articles and books, read them and am grateful, though not
surprised. As I had suspected, a number of very bright people have done
some deep thinking and built promising prototypes.
What I am complaining about is the chaotic, careless and, it seems,
self-absorbed state of that research. As far as I can determine the major
venue is the series of Hypertext conferences run by the ACM, whose
proceedings are online but kept under lock-and-key in the ACM's "Digital
Library", <http://www.acm.org/dl/>, "a vast resource of bibliographic
information, citations, and full-text articles" which costs $185/year to
have unmetred access to; without joining one can purchase individual
articles -- at $10 each (now THERE'S a risk). Hence, if you're not already
part of the sub-community that goes to the conferences and collects the
proceedings volumes, you're severely discouraged from finding out what it's
doing. Outside of this tightly controlled though not topically organised
resource, as far as I can determine there is no current academic
bibliography of research in the area. The ones I have found have all ceased
operation; Brown's Memex and Beyond is, as you've seen, only now getting
started again. The best one can do now is to use Alf-Christian Achilles'
The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies (Karlsruhe),
<http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/>, by which you can search several
concatenated bibliographies. Apparently, since Jeffrey Conkin wrote his
broad survey, "A Survey of Hypertext", in 1987 -- much mentioned in the
literature I have been able to find -- no one has written a sequel, though
the noted Frank Halasz (called "the Zsa Zsa Gabor of hypertext"), in his
"'Seven Issues': Revisited Hypertext '91 Closing Plenary" sadly notes that
most of the problems Conklin discusses are still very much around;
fortunately a transcribed version of his talk is online, without lock, at
<http://www.parc.xerox.com/spl/projects/halasz-keynote/transcript.html>.
Note that it had to be transcribed.
If the research perspectives of humanists and computer scientists are ever
really to mingle, outside the blessed and very special arrangements at a
few institutions (such as IATH, Virginia), something has to be done about
the insular, provincial ways us disciplinary people conduct ourselves. At
least the research has to be able to mingle. With respect to hypertext,
which is all about "how we may think", the humanist's stock-in-trade, the
problem seems quite serious. Ironic, isn't it, with all this talk about
unrestricted availability of stuff online, information "wanting to be free"
and all that? I worry about how, given the difficulty of getting access to
the research, we're actually ever going to be able to do the things with
our scholarly forms that some of us want and all of us need to do outside
of the "big humanities" projects. Truly great things are going on e.g. in
the Perseus Project; read about it in David A Smith, Jeffrey A Rydberg-Cox
and Gregory R Crane, "The Perseus Project: a Digital Library for the
Humanities", in Literary and Linguistic Computing 15.1 (April 2000): 15-25,
<http://www3.oup.co.uk/litlin/hdb/Volume_15/Issue_01/>. But what about the
ordinary, individual scholar, whose ideas e.g. about referentiality in
commentaries on the Torah or about allusion in 17th century English
religious poetry are most relevant to conceptions of nodes and links? With
respect to hypertext, to paraphrase in negation (with apologies) what
Yaacov Choueka once said, the research is hard to get, so the tools aren't
HERE. How can we expect to achieve any results?
We're always complaining among ourselves about those of us who don't do the
reading and end up re-inventing the wheel, or the subroutine or whatever.
After this experience, however, I'm not surprised that few bother to put
themselves in the path of so much frustration. Perhaps rather than use the
model of technological invention ("reinventing the wheel") we should think
of one that happily allows for continuous repetition, such as making babies.
Tell me I'm badly mistaken, please, and show me how. Then send me a
complete run of the Hypertext proceedings volumes. PDF and PostScript files
are most inconvenient to read.
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities /
King's College London / Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
+44 (0)20 7848-2784 / ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/
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