Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 35, No. 348.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2021-11-06 15:31:06+00:00
        From: scholar-at-large@bell.net <scholar-at-large@bell.net>
        Subject: Machines in the Plural >> Re: [Humanist] 35.347: pubs: narratology, digital humanities and beyond

Willard

In the spirit of Undogmatic Reading, some loose notes and a question about your
formulation in "With the Hedgehog or the Fox?” [1]

I found myself trying to triangulate three functions (imagination, intercourse,
information) and wondering about possible stories about the emergence of one or
the other from one or the other. This is the passage that struck me:

[quote]
Thinking like this, as I did, leads to the conviction that our machine is fully
realised when it becomes a device of the imagination, not an information-vending
appliance or means of social intercourse (though both of these are quite
important).
[/quote/

Information-vending appliance -- the library, the archive, the thesaurus ...

Social intercourse -- the networking, the reporting, the community ...

Device of imagination -- devices? a plurality of machines?

I tend toward the plural because one finds many machines on one's computer: the
text editor is one machine, the spreadsheet another, etc. (This may be a
peculiarly Gallic inflection of the notion of machine.)

Would the envisaged imagination dwell in the coupling of machines?

[1] https://hup.sub.uni-
hamburg.de//volltexte/2021/209/chapter/HamburgUP_Flueh_et_al_Reading_McCarty.pdf


~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~
François Lachance
Scholar-at-large
Wannabe Professor of Theoretical and Applied Rhetoric
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
https://berneval.hcommons.org

to think is often to sort, to store and to shuffle: humble, embodied tasks


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