Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 19.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2023-05-12 09:00:22+00:00
From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.5: on scientising the humanities
Dear Maurizio,
I think you make a useful, and important, distinction when you
point out that much work in textual studies treats the texts
as data, rather than as human writings made, by human
authors, with intentions of saying things to other human
readers, and listeners when the texts are read out loud.
This kind of work is far from my expertise, but it does seem
to me to be important to recognise the difference between
trying to understand what texts may have been made to say, and
may also be taken to say, to humans, by looking at,
appreciating, understanding, and taking into account, that
these texts are all somehow embedded in human worlds, usually
in complicated ways.
Ripping these same words from the worlds they are/were formed
in, understood in, used to say things in, and [most often]
converting them into numbers we can [much more conveniently]
compute with, surely leaves vast amounts of these human worlds
behind, and so, in return, can then tell us rather little
about what's going on in the human languaging in written form
we got the data from. No?
It takes humans to say what the words generated by things like
ChatGPT, and its ilk, can be read to say, why, and how.
ChatGPT, et al, doesn't have anything like a human
understanding of human made text. But it doesn't need this
understanding to be able to generate human-like texts
I don't want to say treating human made texts as data gets us
nothing. It does, and it's probably worth having, at least
sometimes, but it's not, and I would say, cannot be, the same
as we get when humans read and try to understand human made
text made to say things to other humans in some human world.
Using [massive amounts of] human made texts as data, to build
representations of the statistical distributions of long
sequences of words, can be used, as we now see, in a
generative mode to make texts that are readable and
understandable, and even well considered, by humans. But what
were we expecting these systems to do, produce, gobbledygook?
Why? Just as with using lots of data to build statistical
distributions for other complicated things, weather patterns,
for example, the more text-as-data used to program -- so
called 'train' -- these large language models results in the
statistical distribution model having higher resolution on the
variations in the 'distribution surface,' and thus a greater
probability of generating texts more often more like the human
made texts use to make the data used here in the first place.
This is, I agree, not uninteresting, and not, not useful, but
it's not the same as trying to understand how human languaging
in written forms works for humans, in all the ways it does,
and, I suggest, doesn't, and can't, tell us much about all
this. But, as I say, I'm not the expert here, so I'm sure you
and others here will be able to correct my thinking on this.
I'd be happy to be corrected.
Best regards,
Tim
> On 9 May 2023, at 07:05, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 5.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2023-05-08 19:35:01+00:00
> From: maurizio lana <maurizio.lana@uniupo.it>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 36.561: on scientising the humanities,
including by digital means
>
> hi Willard,
>
> i think that - don't know if by direct impulse or not from the STEM
> disciplines - the humanities are slowly adopting an "evidence based"
> approach to the reading and interpretation of the textual material,
> thanks to the (humbly named) "text analysis": that is conclusions about
> the meaning of a text are drawn on the basis of evidences - not the
> interpretive genius of the scholar.
>
> obvious that we can discuss what an evidence is in the textual realm:
> but we discuss if those very words ["sd edw wd ww dwdw"] are or are not
> an evidence for a proposed conclusion/interpretation.
>
> much is not going this way in the textual studies but i think that is an
> important direction because when operating this way the text is
> conceived and treated as a type of data, hence analysing a text is a
> type of data analysis.
>
> (nothing new under the sun, all this starts in 1247 in Paris with the
> production of the first concordance of the Bible by Hugues de St-Cher:
> read the text by the text. this shows that scientising the humanities
> doesn't necessarily imply digitising them rather treating the text as
> data Lutoslawski docet)
>
> Maurizio
>
> Il 01/05/23 11:02, Humanist ha scritto:
>> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 36, No. 561.
>> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>> Hosted by DH-Cologne
>> www.dhhumanist.org
>> Submit to:humanist@dhhumanist.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Date: 2023-05-01 08:53:22+00:00
>> From: Willard McCarty<willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
>> Subject: on scientising the humanities, including by digital means
>>
>> Perhaps Barbara Herrnstein Smith's "Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts,
>> Collisions, Negotiations" (Common Knowledge 22.3, September 2016) is
>> known to many here. Somehow I missed it until this morning. It is worth
>> the candle, as we technologically advanced folk like to say to signal
>> that we know a thing or two.
>>
>> Anyhow, in this article Herrnstein Smith addresses "efforts on the part
>> of scholars in humanities disciplines to introduce concepts, methods, or
>> findings from the natural sciences into their home fields...". She
>> brings in specific "models of the dynamics of intellectual history",
>> with particular and important emphasis on Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and
>> Development of a Scientific Fact (1935 in German, 1979, in English).
>> Digital humanities gets considerable attention, "clearly a related
>> development... not so much to make the humanities more scientific
>> (though that is often an element) as to attune... practices more closely
>> to the increasing power and presence of information technologies." Smith
>> is working at a distance from digital humanities, and so (with some
>> exceptions) those feature whom an American literary critic and theorist
>> would tend to see feature, Kathrine Hales in particular.
>>
>> Herrnstein Smith concludes:
>>
>>> There is little reason to think the humanities will fold themselves
>>> into the natural sciences and, I believe, no good reason to think
>>> they should. But there are reasons to think the new hybrid approaches
>>> will survive and prosper... Significantly, practitioners have begun
>>> to respond to external criticism constructively rather than with
>>> defensive hostility and also to engage in discriminating internal
>>> criticism rather than indiscriminate mutual puffing. [...]
>>>
>>> There is much in what I have described here to give us pause and
>>> perhaps to make us weep. Two further considerations, however, can be
>>> heartening. First, there is good reason to think that, even with the
>>> attenuation of “print culture” and the flat-out disappearance of
>>> “classics,” “English,” and even “philosophy,” humans across the globe
>>> will still be inclined to recall, savor, and ponder what fellow
>>> humans have done, made, and articulated, no matter how—or via what
>>> medium—it is transmitted. Second, although desegregations and new
>>> mixtures typically elicit fears of a homogenized or mongrelized
>>> future, cultural and biological history remind us that hybrids often
>>> turn out to be sturdier than their ancestors and, indeed, to be
>>> especially favored in surprising ways. The traditional Western
>>> disciplines, both the sciences and the humanities, are being severely
>>> shaken up by important intellectual and technological developments,
>>> and the attendant collisions of aims, styles, and perspectives can be
>>> locally painful. But the disciplines—again, all of them—are also
>>> being put together in myriad new ways. The new disciplinary
>>> configurations are not, in my view, moving toward ultimate harmony or
>>> unity. But they may be opening out to intellectual landscapes more
>>> interesting than most of us imagine.
>> For me--perhaps few would agree--what jumps out particularly in
>> this article is a quotation from neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee, who
>> asks, "When does neuroscience provide deeper descriptive texture to our
>> knowledge of aesthetics, and when does it deliver added explanatory
>> force?” and comments:
>>
>>> Knowing that the pleasure of viewing a beautiful painting is
>>> correlated with activity within the orbito-frontal cortex . . . adds
>>> biologic texture to our understanding of the rewards of aesthetic
>>> experiences. However, it is not obvious that it . . . advances our
>>> understanding of the psychological nature of that reward. For
>>> neuroscience to make important contributions to aesthetics, the
>>> possibility of an inner psychophysics has to be taken seriously.
>> The foregoing is intended only to whet your palate, which I trust it has
>> by the time you read this. Comments most welcome--after you've read the
>> thing and digested it inwardly, please.
>>
>> Yours,
>> WM
>>
>> --
>> Willard McCarty,
>> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
>> Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
>> www.mccarty.org.uk
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> la Repubblica promuove lo sviluppo della cultura e la ricerca scientifica e
> tecnica.
> la Repubblica detta le norme generali sull'istruzione ed istituisce scuole
> statali per tutti gli ordini e gradi.
> Costituzione della Repubblica Italiana, art. 9 e 33
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Maurizio Lana
> Università del Piemonte Orientale
> Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
> Piazza Roma 36 - 13100 Vercelli
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