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