Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 421.
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: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 09:09:00 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: hypertext research and the outsider
My energetic thanks to Einat Amitay, whose pointers have proven very
valuable indeed. The two bibiographic search-engines, The Research Index
<http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/> and the Computer Science Research Paper
Search Engine <http://www.cora.jprc.com/>, are handy, and the pointers to
individuals' collections of their own papers also, esp. Catherine
Marshall's and Randy Trigg's; some of the others I'd found already. The
strategy for locating free papers I'd worked out for myself and indeed
teach much the same to my students -- no more than extensions of
tried-and-true methods for sniffing out bibliographic traces. My point was
that I'd discovered a sorry state of affairs, and I was making a case for
doing something about it. Eventually I'll see to it that a beginner's
HIGHLY selective bibliography gets posted somewhere, but meanwhile some
observations:
(1) As Paul Evan Peters said, welcome to "the dawn of the meso-electronic
period... "[A]fter all the appropriate slack has been cut, the best that
can be said as far as I am concerned is that we are using crude tools with
which we are having some uneven but very real success in fashioning crude
but functional electronic artifacts.... To my way of thinking, we are
clearly at the end of the period in which cheap stunts, brillant hacks, and
acts of ignorance or desperation were the principal ways for creating
useful and affordable network resources and services." (Keynote Address,
Digital Libraries '94, <http://csdl.tamu.edu/csdl/DL94/peters.keynote.html>.
(2) In that spirit I observe that MUCH more than high-powered and
well-funded research is required to move beyond those "acts of ignorance or
desperation" -- of which my complaint gives example. We need to
*communicate* across disciplinary boundaries, not be satisfied with life
inside walled compounds. I'm not talking here about developing some kind of
common vocabulary or setting up yet another agency or special interest
group; we already have the former (as the papers of Randy Trigg, Jim
Rosenberg, Catherine Marshall et al. show) and too many of the latter. We
simply (or not so simply) need to make our research openly available and
organise it so that the intelligent outsider can understand what's
happening. For this we do indeed have the tools. Do we have the will?
(3) Bridging disciplinary cultures is indeed very difficult. From one
perspective my complaint can be seen as the common experience of a person
looking in on a discipline in which he has not been trained. It can be very
difficult in fact for such a person to recognise that what goes on in the
foreign discipline IS scholarship. Thus my difficulty? To someone like me
published work is all, whatever the medium, however slowly it happens. Is
it the case that in (non-mathematical) CS the software prototypes are
primary, the papers actually quite secondary? If so, then is it more than a
bit much for me to expect such effort to be put into openly accessible
publication as in the humanities?
For the sake of argument let's say that we have open access to what is now
published in CS hypertext research. Further, let's say that the people in
that area heed Randy Trigg's exhortations at
<http://www.parc.xerox.com/spl/members/trigg/HT96-keynote/>, as follows:
>First, we need to look hard at our own *history* to avoid reinventing old
>wheels as well as repeating old errors.... Second, we need to look to
>*neighboring fields* like the emerging "Digital Libraries" for
>inspiration.... Finally, I suggest that hypermedia has an important
>integrative contribution to make to activities like collaboration,
>mobilization and volunteering that comprise the under-valued work of
>*community-building* taking place on the web.
(The explicit emphasis marks are mine, but he does call these
exhortations.) Would it then be our job as computing humanists to form the
two-way bridge between such an historically self-aware outward-looking
discipline on the one hand and the humanities on the other?
Comments?
Yours,
WM
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