Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 52.
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: Matt Kirschenbaum <mgk@pop.uky.edu> (85)
Subject: Re: 15.050 obstacles to humanities computing
[2] From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mgk@pop.uky.edu> (47)
Subject: Re: 15.050 obstacles to humanities computing
[3] From: Leo Robert Klein <leo@patachon.com> (34)
Subject: Re: 15.050 obstacles to humanities computing
[4] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (80)
Subject: obstacles and fertility
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 06:36:46 +0100
From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mgk@pop.uky.edu>
Subject: Re: 15.050 obstacles to humanities computing
Kudos to Adrian Miles, who in response to a proposed list of what every PhD
needs to know, points out:
>the above, for me, completely assumes:
>that computing humanities apparently has little or nothing that it wants to
say about:
>painting
>sound
>still image
>moving image
>[ . . .]
>
>
> i think my very general question, as someone in cinema studies with
> computers, is why are these major cultural forms of the last 100 years
> largely invisible *to* computing humanities? Is computing humanities
> primary concern with the static and stable textual object (manuscript,
> etc)? Why doesn't it seem to have much to say about these things?
The answer here is, I suspect, primarily historical; that is, humanities
computing traces its roots back to a time when computers were (comparatively)
good at manipulating words, and much less good (and efficient) at manipulating
images, particularly raster images. (There are sessions readily recognizable as
"humanities computing" from the MLA programs of the early 1970s, for example.)
Thus the foundation of the field, historically and technologically, has been
textual.
In my own opinion, it's high time we collectively acknowledged this and thought
through the ramifications, not least because from a computational standpoint
images and text remain very different entities. Both images and text are
computable, but they are not computable by means of the same algorithms, the
same software, or even (and especially) the same intellectual assumptions.
Using SGML at the Blake Archive we have, perhaps, managed something akin to a
keyword in context search for images, but even that analogy quickly breaks down
once one begins thinking about how the visual images are being linguistically
encoded (I gesture here to Kari Kraus's upcoming ACH/ALLC paper on the subject
of image description).
But there is also another set of issues at stake. In my editor's introdution to
a forthcoming issue of Computers and the Humanities on the subject of
image-based humanities computing, I write:
"In my experience, image-based humanities computing serves as a powerful
demonstration to the humanities at large that the computer is something more
than an instrument for computation---that it is also a venue for
representation.
This is clearly evident from the technical procedures that major image-based
projects have helped cultivate [ . . .] But it is also evident in a more
visceral sense, one we ought not to be bashful about acknowledging: the genuine
excitement of seeing a high-resolution, 24-bit color image wash across the
display screen. Many mainstream humanities scholars have long been skeptical of
quantitative research methodswitness, for example, the sinister Centre for
Computational Stylistics depicted in David Lodge's academic satire Small World.
This skepticism has in turn lead to apathy towards computers, apathy which in
my view was not entirely misplaced so long as the computer's primary role in
the humanities was, ostensibly, to compute. But show colleagues a painting from
the Rossetti Archive, or a digital image of one of Emily Dickinson's turbulent
manuscripts and that skepticism vanishes, or is at least replaced with more
to-the-point questions about image acquisition and editorial fidelity, not to
mention scholarly and pedagogical potential. These are questions of
representation, and they are eminently relevant to the work of the humanities."
Several years back, I posted to Humanist my own list of what every computing
humanist ought to know. I just had another look and still stand by it; here it
is, lightly edited:
* text-encoding/theory and practice of markup;
* digital image creation and manipulation;
* fundamentals of library science and information retrieval;
* theory and practice of textual editing, both electronic and print;
* principals of graphic design;
* interface theory and design;
* electronic poetry and fiction;
* cyberpunk and the history of science fiction;
* digital music and the digital arts; digital culture;
* the history of writing;
* the history of the book;
* the history of other media;
* the history of computing, artificial intelligence, and telecommunications
networks;
* chaos theory and fuzzy logic;
* practical introduction to Javascript, VRML [now largely defunct], Shockwave
[Flash], and other networked multimedia formats;
* current issues in electronic publishing, in both commercial and academic
settings;
* exposure to a programming/scripting language;
* fundamentals of linguistics and symbolic logic;
* project management skills;
* introduction to intellectual property and copyright issues;
* computer-assisted pedagogies
Of course finding (and funding) the time to do/read/learn all that is another
matter.
Best, Matt
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 06:37:44 +0100
From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mgk@pop.uky.edu>
Subject: Re: 15.050 obstacles to humanities computing
Some comments on the thread about software design and its "indictment" of
humanities computing. I sympathize with those who don't much sympathize
with those who are unwilling to invest time and energy (and even money) in
learning new tools. A Blake scholar wishing to do research of any
sophistication can't get far without coming to grips with Bentley's Blake
Books, a reference tome I suspect few Blakeans would describe as
user-friendly. It takes a little time and a little energy to learn to use
it, and money too if one doesn't have access to a library that already owns
the volume or is willing to acquire it. I also think that the notion that
humanities computing has somehow failed its mandate if it has not provided
sufficient quantities of user-friendly software tools misses the point, for
that line of thinking relegages humanities computing to the academic
service sector . . . and that's a job I'm not much interested in.
I am, however, currently engaged in a software project of my own, one that
is designing an environment for comparing, and remotely sharing, image
sets. Of course I hope that our tool will be widely useful and used. But I
wouldn't be involved in the project if it wasn't fun. By "fun," though, I
don't mean fun in the same sense that a vacation is fun. Here's what I do
mean by "fun": yesterday I was designing some icons for our toolbar
interface; that was fun because it appealed to my instincts for graphic
design, a kind of hobby. A week earlier, I was writing a longish email to
my collaborators detailing some shortcomings in the behavior of our GUI;
that also appealed to my design instincts, and was fun because I had never
built a GUI from the ground up before. Prior to that, thinking through some
problems in authority control (how to keep multiple participants in a
session with the software from initiating mutually exclusive actions) was
fun because it was a kind of analytical thinking different from the
literary critical thinking in which I was officially trained. The truth is
that if I did _not_ find these activities fun, I would not be working at
them no matter how important or vital I thought the tool we were building
really was. Instead I would be teaching nineteenth century American
literature, the field I originally enterred graduate school to pursue (or
perhaps, given the job market in that field, I would now be plumbing).
My broader point ( belabored though it might be), is that software design
in the humanities is almost certainly even more contingent than we already
acknowledge: it depends on one or more individuals with the requisite skill
sets who are also predisposed to derive the kinds of personal satisfaction
I have been describing above, simultaneously occupying a time and a place
where there are sufficient material/institutional resources to pursue the
work at hand. There are only a few places around the world where the stars
are right for that on anything like a regular basis, and even in those
places it's sometimes hard to keep the constellations fixed. That may
change as humanities computing comes more and more into its own (witness
the emerging degree programs and growing numbers of jobs in the field),
but not if we browbeat people with the notion that what they really should
be doing is building tools for the AOL generation. (BTW, by my unscientific
estimate the average number of times the word "easy" appears in a 30-second
AOL spot is 5.5---count for yourself.) Best, Matt
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 06:38:24 +0100
From: Leo Robert Klein <leo@patachon.com>
Subject: Re: 15.050 obstacles to humanities computing
on 5/26/01 Adrian Miles wrote:
> At 6:15 +0100 25/5/2001, Kirk Lowery wrote:
>> Ideally, then, a brand, spanking new humanities PhD *minimally* ought to:
>>
>> 1. Be able to write programs to manipulate text, and to be able to create
>> and manage databases. This implies knowledge of:
>> a. the Perl programming language
>> b. Regular expressions
>> c. How programs can be "hacked" together from pieces of code lying
>> about the net
>> 2. Be able to collaborate with others. This implies knowledge of:
>> a. Web authoring (and HTML/XML) and markup
>> c. "Groupware" allowing networked collaboration
>
> to enter into the spirit of Charles' comments and what the above, for me,
> completely assumes:
>
> that computing humanities apparently has little or nothing that it wants to
> say about:
Let me chime in to totally agree with Adrian. If we're going about setting
requirements for new humanities PhDs, I'd consider figuring out the
ins-and-outs of Photoshop and vector-based animation or maybe a 3D program
just as valid and commendable as having to tackle regEx and the O'Reilly
Camel. There's no reason to needlessly scare people away especially when
the possibilities of what they can do are simply so much more expansive than
what is suggested above. If they want to do databases or text manipulation
-- hey, that's okay too -- only I'd let them choose their own solution
whatever that implied.
LEO
P.S. I'd have them do a little plumbing along the way.
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home ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: http://patachon.com
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--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 07:00:15 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: obstacles and fertility
In his very important essay, "Farewell to the Information Age" (in the
collection of essays, The Future of the Book, which he edited) Geoffrey
Nunberg comments that the forms of discourse emerging in this
post-informational age "tend to mirror those of the preinformation age". He
points, as one might guess, to the professional discussion groups, such as
this one. He notes "the opening up of the right to speak", which reverses
"the effects of nineteenth-century immurement and professionalization of
the disciplines... a transition from the republic of letters to the
bureaucracy of letters", where a writer must continually declare style and
department and submit to an examination of purpose and credentials at the
frontier to every field. Discussion groups, Nunberg says, don't just permit
the participation of interested amateurs, "they also remove the burden of
professionalism that was imposed in the nineteenth century to limit the
published discourse of the sciences to descriptions of its 'subject matter'
and purge it of critical self-consideration. The amateur epistemologizing
and sociologizing, the pedagogical and technical lore, the gossip and the
professional politics, the anecdotal observations about curiosities that
lie outside the realm of current theory -- all these come bubbling back
into public view from the orality where they have been repressed for the
past two hundred years...." (pp. 130f). Do we need to be told that what's
happening here is important -- that it's more important than simply the
constant building of a community centre? Perhaps we do.
"Of course it can be a risky matter to read all this informationally, "
Nunberg comments -- which leads me to my second point, in aid of a great
deal, though perhaps not obviously. By now, I expect, the thorn-bush words
that have announced the death of "the impression of information" (as
Nunberg brilliantly says) and put it into an historical context will have
pricked a few readers. Better than anyone I know, Nunberg has looked very
closely at "information", this "uniform and morselised substance
indifferent not just to the medium that it resides in but also to the kind
of representation it embodies" (philosophical alert!), and shown it to be a
particular "mode of reading", an artefact of a certain way of doing things
that so-called "information technology" is, he argues, bringing to an end.
I never was particularly happy with the word "information", but now it's
hard to say without it triggering a great deal of conscious mental activity.
I keenly appreciate Mark Wolff's comment, in Humanist 15.041, that
academics quite understandably get annoyed at the extra-territorial demands
which humanities computing can place on their attention. These can be from
trivial causes, such as the rebarbative interface I must face when using
fsconcordance. I'm quite prepared to be told, o grow up, you've mastered
and re-mastered more difficult stuff before &c. (And the person who tells
me this should be prepared for me to reply that I really do have better
things to do with my time, and the DOS-prompt interface is not what we want
to promote &c.) But Wolff's point is more serious than that. The fact is
that the humanities computing components of research projects which are
primarily in other fields do make sometimes unsupportable intellectual
demands on those in the other fields, who are forced by practical
circumstances to ignore many fascinating problems along the way.
And the difficulties only get worse. I am looking (almost) as I write at a
quite long shelf and a half of books I had to read and understand on the
way to writing an article, for a collection in classical studies, that took
me nearly a year to produce. (Let us say for the purposes of argument that
this is a very fine article; I cannot tell, but the point doesn't turn on
its quality.) This shelf and a half doesn't contain the dozens of articles,
mostly printed out from the ACM Digital Library, which are piled elsewhere,
nor the still electronic ones piled virtually on my hard disk. None of this
stuff is in either of my conventional fields. And then, through the
kindness of Matt Kirschenbaum, I have encountered the brilliant new book
(picking up on a point by Adrian Miles, about the narrow-mindedness of
humanities computing....), The Language of New Media, by Lev Manovich (MIT
Press, 2001), which is beginning to change the way I see a number of
things. Someone's got to put a STOP to this! :-) Or introduce me to one of
those Star Trek creatures who moves and lives so fast that all ordinary
people hear is a buzz.
Yes, I do remember what happens to those who are thus introduced.
Suggestion withdrawn. It's clearly no good to push item upon item into the
bulging curriculum; only mental indigestion and other forms of polymathic
stress will result. We need to think more subtly about a broad survey of
many fields followed by specialisations here or there. I think if I were a
philosopher or historian or sociologist I'd be mightily intrigued by the
possibility of constructing a survey course or courses in which my
discipline had to fit in along side several others. Perhaps this is not so
different a vision from the one responsible for the humanities programme at
my alma mater, Reed College, and like things elsewhere.
The late Don Fowler wrote, in "Criticism as commentary and commentary as
criticism in the age of electronic media", of the potential which our field
offers: that "the commentary becomes fluid, an emblem not of monumental
solution but of the continuing fertility of problematisation" (Most, ed.,
Commentaries, p. 441). And so this gardener's lament is a celebration. L'chaim!
Yours,
WM
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