Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 471.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2024-02-29 09:45:08+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: in praise of an alien AI & DH

James A. Evans and Jacob G. Foster, "Algorithmic Abduction: Robots for
Alien Reading". Critical Inquiry 50.3 (Spring 2024), 375-401. The first
two paragraphs are as follows (footnotes deleted):

> Should we be surprised that (some) humanists have taken to
> algorithmic methods with gusto? Marching under the banner of digital
> humanities and marshaling an army of reading robots, these scholars
> have established beachheads at top universities and captured hoards
> of grant support on a scale previously unimaginable. 1 Yet there
> remains a tension between humanistic scholarly practice—which
> venerates originality, interpretation, subtlety, and insight—and the
> way that digital humanists have typically deployed algorithmic
> tools.
>
> How should humanists incorporate algorithms? The typical answer is to
> clone, in detail and in silico, the activities of human scholars.
> Human eyes tire of scanning musty paper for signs of influence, while
> robot readers race through digitized text, parsing prose and counting
> distinctive keywords. Humans teach long-standing traditions for the
> classification of poems to their algorithmic assistants, which carry
> out the classification task faster than any human could.  By
> construction, such reading robots are incapable of doing what
> creative scholars do. A good reader disrupts certainties in producing
> new ones. These reading robots are not yet good readers.

Not mentioned the above article is Steven Millhauser's brilliant short
story, "The New Automaton Theatre", in The Knife Thrower and Other 
Stories, pp. 76-96. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998), also the 
discussion of that story by Philip Mirowski in Machine Dreams: 
Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, pp. 23-25 (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Read it all tonight, esp Millhauser's story, and forever think
differently about artificial intelligence and indeed, as Evans and
Foster suggest, about digital humanities :-).

Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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