Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 98.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.96: more on that thesis: ? (61)
[2] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: my thesis (50)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2023-06-11 16:04:03+00:00
From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.96: more on that thesis: ?
Hi Ken,
Treat Willard's thesis as a Fluxus piece.
Take the essential contribution of computing to the
humanities to lie in the analogical character of digital
modelling, whose mode of expression is by nature
simultaneously like and unlike our own, and then blink
five and a half times.
That should help, I think.
Best regards,
Tim
> On 11 Jun 2023, at 08:09, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 96.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2023-06-10 07:05:31+00:00
> From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.90: a thesis
>
> Hi, Willard,
>
> This thesis puzzles me a bit. I’m curious and I want to know more because I’m
> not sure what you mean.
>
>> The essential contribution of computing to the humanities lies in the
>> analogical character of digital modelling, whose mode of expression
>> is by nature simultaneously like and unlike our own.
>
>
> Would you please elaborate?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ken
>
> Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The
Journal
> of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in
> Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-
> journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
>
> Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and
Innovation
> | Tongji University | Shanghai, China | Email ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com |
> Academia https://tongji.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I
http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2023-06-11 07:10:44+00:00
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: my thesis
First things first, i.e. Ken's question: "what you mean" by it.
I had been reading Graham M. Jones, Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of
Analogy (Chicago, 2017) on the complex history of analogy in the story
of French illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin's programme to persuade
the Algerians that the magic of their ritual performers was nothing but
skilled deception. (He did this at the behest of the French colonial
authorities to defuse a dangerous threat to their grip on power in North
Africa from the Sufis. The evidence is patchy but thus is the story.) What
interested me is the complexity, out of which Jones skilfully pulls the
dialectic of analogy and disanalogy, that is, the two-way traffic between
the analogised phenomena.
To put the matter crudely, we are all the time finding likeness--oh! the
computer is like the brain!--and quickly ditching the unlikenesses as
mere residue of research, so much so we want to know WHAT IT REALLY
IS. But the complexity isn't so much there as in the developmental
process by which both analogical likenesses and unlikenesses go on to
affect how we think about the analogised phenomenon and whatever
is connected with it.
Does that make sense enough to poke holes in it?
Is not the computer a modelling machine? Are not models analogical.
hence like and unlike simultaneously?
So, Paul's most welcome rejoinder: "What about the essential
contribution of humanities to computing?" What indeed. If we're talking
about computing as a kind of engineering, then wouldn't answers come
from asking that very question of older forms of engineering? This would
send me to the likes of Walter Vincenti and Eugene Ferguson, and to
historian Mike Mahoney. If a kind of architecture, then, among others,
those listed by Neil Leach in Rethinking Architecture (1997) or to
Annabel Jane Wharton's Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive,
Addictive Lives of Buildings (2015). Oddly enough the question gets
easier with the hugely difficult application of computing to modelling
intelligence.
But I am just thrashing around here. I think Paul could answer his own
question better than I, or others here deeper into the technical side of
computing than I've ever been.
Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk
_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
