Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 50.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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Date: 2026-06-11 22:47:47+00:00
From: amc22 <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re:[Humanist]40.47:what's wrong +intelligence?
Date: 2026-06-10 01:55:01+00:00
From: Bill Pascoe <bill.pascoe@unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.42: what's wrong
Dear Bill,
Thank you very much for this well informed rejoinder!
You write:
<quote>
Did Brutus kill Caesar? Why? We can’t count how many time Brutus killed Caesar,
to do science, but it is still a question we can make truth claims about, and which is
important to our understanding of politics, literature, the human condition,
etc. etc.
</quote>
Well. Actually, the majority opinion is, Marcus Iunius Brutus Caepio did not
kill Caesar. He was one of 23. (No, counting them does not make much sense.)
For some reason, he is almost never quoted alone. 90 % of the historians find it
difficult to mention him without pointing out, that he was supposed to be a far
descendant from Lucius Junius Brutus who did not kill, but depose Lucius
Tarquinius Superbus, thereby founding the Roman Republic. This descendancy via
the gens Junia – not any gens of Brutii – is by those historians I usually read,
frequently quoted as putting enormous pressure upon Marcus, a.k.a. Brutus the 1
/ 23th killer of Marcus Julius, to follow in the footsteps of Lucius, a.k.a. one
of the two first consuls.
Those historians I usually read are also not so much interested in the role of
Brutus on the Ides of March, but wonder more about the position of this specific
murder in the process which lead from the Republic to the principat (and the
more violent versions of changing an emperor for another in later years). It’s
very interesting to compare the behavior of the patricians against the Gracchi
with the conjuration against Gaius Julius. In both cases violence issued as a
patrician reaction against a threat to the influence available to the senate,
but the implementation of the three “forceful removals of the threatening
individual” followed completely different schems, the relationship between which
is- for those historians I read - much more interesting than the question,
whether Brutus was a 1/23th murderer of Caesar.
Now “Brutus” is a very peculiar name, actually. As dedicated Humanist, you are
of course familiar with the Roman naming scheme: prenomen, nomen gentile,
cognomen. We both know of course, that Brutus was a strange intermediate
category: It was NO nomen gentile, but it was a cognomen which is generally
assumed to be very closely connected to the gens Junia.
Now let’s assume, that one of the historians I usually read would be interested
in a question like:
(1) Which people carried “Brutus” as part of a name during various periods
of Roman history?
(2) Did “Brutus” appear in periods, where the concept of regicide was rather
low key?
(3) ….
I’m sorry, if the historians you are reading find this without interest. Those I
read do.
Setting up a data base to support such an interest is of course very trivial.
Just three fields: prenomen, nomen gentile, cognomen and you are game.
OK, unfortunately there WAS a gens of Brutii actually. So, it is not always
clear, whether a guy (or a lady for that matter) you encounter as Brutus or
Brutia are simply from a rather unimportant, mainly equestrian gens from
Bruttium. Or whether they have been sounding so much about the republic and the
un-Romanness of kings that they proudly called their children Brutus or Brutia
(or might have been so enervating about it to their neighbours that the later
added that cognomen on the gravestone).
With your deep understanding of historical research you may consider it trivial:
Simply create a database, which allows to assign the name Brutus to both the
nomen gentile and the cognomen (or possibly also a field for names acquired by
adoption?) and provides a flexible mechanism to allow you do execute your search
operations so that you easily can compare results of the searches for names
under different categories of degrees of assurance of the assumptions which went
into the assignments to the different fields of names.
Frankly, whether you COUNT the names at the end of it is the least of my
problems. Being able to compare the context in which various sub-populations of
names occur would be completely OK for the historians I usually read. But they
WOULD like to compare them. Comfortably.
Maybe a database which would support this kind of ambiguity or rather
pluribiguity would help? Or have I overlooked a recent development in database
technology?
So much on Brutus.
You write furthermore:
<quote>
Many of the tools we use arise from that background - information technology is
assumed to be a ’science’ and maths, though as symbol manipulation it is as much
about language and meaning.
</quote>
I will not engage now in a detailed discussion of the relationship between
computer science, maths, software technology, information technology and
specific branches like computer linguistics. Let me just ask a direct question:
Keith Devlin: Logic and Information, Cambridge University Press, 1991 ( if I
remember correctly), has proposed a subbranch of Mathematics which deals
specifically with “information” just as the subbranch of “geometry” deals
specifically with “spatial phenomena”.
In my naïve approach to the relationship between information technology and the
Humanities how many attempts to support this approach which reads almost
directly targeted at the Humanities by any kind of experimental implementation
have I overlooked?
<quote>
I create a data structure for an ‘event’ object, which must have a unique
location, and time, and may have multiple people.
</quote>
Admirable. Unfortunately, the events the historians I worked with over the
decades refused frequently to have unique – i.e.: non ambiguous – locations and
times.
So, what is better:
(a) To ignore anything which refuses to be unique?
(b) To insert the data into crisp structures, ignoring the inconveniences
created by the sources?
(c) To research data structures which are allowed to be ambiguous from the
very beginning?
I find no direct quote of you, to which I can append the following:
Tara Andrews in https://journals.openedition.org/digitalmedievalist/313 argues,
that historical knowledge is better to be understood as a quintuple {subject,
predicate, object, source, authority} rather than the classical triple {subject,
predicate, object}. As any n-tuple can be represented as a set of n-1-tuples,
you can of course represent the quintuple by a set of triples. If the quintuple
is the primary form, this type of information occurs, might it not nevertheless
be a good idea, to support it directly? (Consult the historians you normally
work with – particularly those which wonder about Brutus – why this is
important.)
Finally, let me say, that I would support one of your statements without any
reservation: “Digital Humanities” in the meantime means so many different and
contradictory things for different people, that I’ll finally abstain of writing
it. I do not use it since some time without the prefix “so called” but I thought
in Humanist it was acceptable as an acknowledged empty term pointing in a
diffuse but vaguely agreed upon direction.
Best,
Manfred
Am Donnerstag, Juni 11, 2026 08:16 CEST, schrieb Humanist
<humanist@dhhumanist.org>:
<abbreviated>
> --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: 2026-06-10 01:55:01+00:00
> From: Bill Pascoe <bill.pascoe@unimelb.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.42: what's wrong
>
> Just a point related to this if I understand it right:
>
> "As long as there is no serious recognition of the assumption, that the
> Humanities pose questions, for which the concrete technologies we have
> are insufficient, not because the technology does not exist, but because
> the abstract models on which such technologies are founded do not fit
> the material available to Humanists, there is no progress on this”
>
> One of the main issues with digital humanities is a naive approach
> to/assumptions about it, that you might find in someone who is new to it, or
who
> has a science, engineering background etc. Many of the tools we use arise from
> that background - information technology is assumed to be a ’science’ and
maths,
> though as symbol manipulation it is as much about language and meaning. As a
> metaphor, the writer of the first software was both the child of a romantic
> poet, and a gifted mathematician. Her first thoughts on the implications of
what
> had begun related to both solving maths problems and philosophical
speculations
> on the nature of mind. Anyway, the point is that people tend to assume that
> Digital Humanities is the application of scientific or mathematical methods to
> humanities. Eg: do statistics on words. Get loads of data ‘observations’ on a
> humanities topic, and run correlations, test hypotheses etc. We can and do do
> that, and it’s useful, and provides insights that would not have been possible
> without it, but that is not the main point. The point is we aren’t limited to
> that in the same way that humanities is not limited to science. Science can
only
> study repeatable phenomena - eg: you must make repeated observations, ceteris
> parabis, and record the data, otherwise it’s not valid science; a scientific
> experiment must be repeatable by another to test it, otherwise it’s not
science
> - this is a factor in the epistemology and ontology of science. In humanities
we
> can study those, such as the history of Pacific fisheries by counting how many
> ships from which countries caught how many fish - that’s a repetition of
> something, but we just as often, or more often study things which are multi-
> factor and highly historically contingent and relative unique. Did Brutus kill
> Caesar? Why? We can’t count how many time Brutus killed Caesar, to do science,
> but it is still a question we can make truth claims about, and which is
> important to our understanding of politics, literature, the human condition,
etc
> etc.
>
> So when we really get into DH, and this applies to most people I know who have
> been involved in DH, we see it as an adaption of those tools, which are
grounded
> in scientistic epistemology and ontology, to humanities different needs. It’s
> bricolage - taking these tools and turning them to our own purpose, which has
> some fundamental differences to the purposes those tools were built for. To do
> humanities with these tools and methods, we need to hack them, reassemble
them,
> and augment them with new APIs and user interfaces, etc. The
> political/social/ethical reasons we choose projects - why this data, why this
> this data structure and not another, and how and what we represent, are also
> crucial factors important, and sometimes the most important thing, in relation
> to which an algorithm or statistical method used is trivial. A simple example
-
> I’m doing colonial history. I use computers to find ‘repeated observations’ in
> vast amounts of text. These are events on a certain topic. I do the same to
find
> information on another topic, perhaps in another corpus. The statistics on
this
> are useful and interesting and part of the contextual story. But in addition,
> this data allows me to navigate from point to point across datasets to piece
> together a story. Here is data on sheep imports and data on profits, plus data
> on events, plus data on squatters runs, plus data on conflict events. By
putting
> all this together there is a broad context of a massive influx of sheep in a
> short time period, and demand for pasture, driven by global demand. Within
this
> is the personal story - these 6 events involved this squatter, who owned a run
> in this location, while these other datapoints represents the movements of a
> resistance fighter, which intersects with these other resistance fighters,
which
> intersect with this event on that squatters run. And I also have the UI tools
to
> read what the squatter wrote about it, and a 3D map to get some sense of the
> places these things happened in which have ethical and emotional implications.
> Also importantly, this has made me reconceptualise the way I understand both
> stories and data, in a hybrid literary and IT way, I have data on people,
places
> and times, I create a data structure for an ‘event’ object, which must have a
> unique location, and time, and may have multiple people. A ‘plot’ can be
> ‘plotted’ by connecting events along some common attribute, such as the
> biographical plot of all occurrences of this one person across multiple
> datasets, including ‘event’ data. This is analogous to simple notion that a
> story has a character setting and a plot. This is a more structuralist
> perspective. There are countless plots in the data. A person with the UI can
> explore them as they wish. The network of intersecting plots: de-centred,
> asynchronous, non-canonical, choose-your-own adventure, narratives is a post-
> structuralist perspective. It is also classical. It is analogous to the
‘weave’
> of the fates in Greek myth, and how there are recurring characters crossing
over
> on different story lines. It’s analogous to the intersection of songlines.
>
> To get back to the original question though, this is an aside because this is
> not about what people in DH don’t see, it’s more about what people not in DH
> superficially assume DH is, without seeing the depth of what it really is.
>
> BTW, there was always a question about what it should be called - the main
shift
> was from ‘Computational Humanities’ to ‘Digital Humanities’, but none of them
> seemed to fit quite right, but were something we'd settle for, so we could
stop
> choosing the band name and get on with making the music. These don’t translate
> well into a title either ‘Computational Humanist’ and ‘Digital Humanist’ have
> alternate meanings that are not intended. We’re not necessarily ‘humanists’
and
> I’m not digital, I’m corporeal. I’m leaning toward ‘Humanities technologist’
as
> a more general and applicable term - it means knowing how to do things in
> Humanities. It’s not necessarily limited to computers, but it is about the
shift
> in focus to ‘know how’, technology. Shift from what? Knowledge production and
> storage? Logocentrism? Theory and critique? The point is we still do all those
> things, but the focus is on ‘how’ we do them, because while publishing
> technology and infrastructure remained relatively static as the principle
> technology of academia, the radical change in Information Technology has
called
> this ‘how’ into question. This might be the main shift in humanities over the
> last few decades at the scale of ‘romanticism’, ‘positivism’, ’structuralism’,
> ‘post-structuralism’, etc.
>
> Bill Pascoe
>
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