Willard McCarty

Humanities Computing: Essential Problems, Experimental Practice

The application of computing to the disciplines of the humanities has two principal outcomes: useful results for the field of application and failures completely to demonstrate what is known. These failures, an inevitable feature of modelling, point to the key question for humanities computing, how we know what we know, and so to the beginning of its own scholarly enquiry. This, I argue, proceeds along three branches, the algorithmic, the metatextual, and the representational. Examining the first of these here I argue for research toward an open-ended, interoperable set of primitives based on previous work in the field and designed for the emerging digital library environment. To set the stage for their further development I argue that the field as a whole does not wait on a theoretical formulation of what humanists do, rather should look to the tradition of experimental knowledge-making as this has been illuminated in recent years by historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science.

Getting there from here. Remembering the future of digital humanities Roberto Busa Award lecture 2013

In this slightly modified version of my 2013 Roberto Busa Prize lecture, I look from the first four decades of digital humanities through its present toward a possible future. I find a means to construct this future by paying close attention to the enemy we need in order to grow: the fear that closed down the horizons of imaginative exploration during the years of the Cold War and that re-presents itself now clothed in numerous techno-scientific challenges to the human. ................................................................................................................................................................................. Not only science but also poetry and thinking conduct experiments. These experiments do not simply concern the truth or falsity of hypotheses . . . rather, they call into question Being itself, before or beyond its determination as true or false. These experiments are without truth, for truth is what is at issue in them . . . . Whoever submits himself to [them] jeopardizes not so much the truth of his own statements as the very mode of his existence; he undergoes an anthropological change that is just as decisive in the context of the individual’s natural history as the liberation of the hand by the erect position was for the primate or as was, for the reptile, the transformation of limbs that changed it

Text and Genre in Reconstruction : Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions

Read for free online: leading scholars investigate how the digital medium has altered the way we read and write text.

Tree, Turf, Centre, Archipelago—or Wild Acre? Metaphors and Stories for Humanities Computing,

The social acceptability of computing to the humanities is no longer a serious problem, although its role in research is sometimes overlooked or must be kept decorously out of sight. The real problem is that in an academic world largely defined by disciplinary turf-polity, possibilities for it are severely constricted. As was true in the early days of computer science, humanities computing is still likely to be seen, judged and funded not as an integral practice but piecemeal, in the widely differing terms of the disciplines to which it is applied. In this essay, I go after antiquated figures of thought responsible for this blinkered, piecemeal view. Reasoning from the evident importance of geopolitical metaphors to our operative conception of disciplinarity, I look down under, and back in time, for different, less constricting metaphors and draw out of them a different professional myth to live by.

Looking through an unknown, remembered gate: interdisciplinary meditations on humanities computing

Abstract Humanities computing is an ‘interdiscipline’ concerned with the application of computing to the arts and letters. Although it has been practised since the late 1940s, it has only recently begun to gain institutional recognition and a measure of self-awareness. In this contribution to the vigorous debate among practitioners, I argue for a common methodological ground shared by computer using scholars and students across the disciplines of the humanities. In large part because of the commons, these individuals tend to come together physically in laboratory settings as well as virtually online, pursuing traditional research goals by the means they now share, or collaborating on numerous larger projects that computing has enabled. A useful model of their collaboration is Peter Galisons ‘trading zone’, an anthropological–linguistic metaphor he uses to describe interchange among researchers and technicians of the Manhattan Project. Humanities computing functions like a merchant trader in a Galisonian trading zone: it sees to a similar interchange of tools and techniques among the departmentalised cultures with which it deals, and for itself studies the effects and consequences. It thus exemplifies a true interdisciplinarity. Sufficient work has now been done for us to begin to map out a research agenda for humanitites computing as an interdiscipline, and this will help to identify the essential habits of mind and skills our colleagues and students must have to refurbish the humanities in the twenty-first century. Computing presents the humanities with the need and opportunity to reconceptualise and rebuild our inherited scholarly forms, which are as historically contingent as any human artefact. Rethinking how we do what we do in turn requires what Clifford Geertz has called ‘intellectual weed control’. A central project of humanities computing is to help in the construction of a worldwide digital library of resources and tools. Its role within this project is, I argue, primarily to articulate the powers of imagination that computing in the humanities demands of us.

As It Almost Was: Historiography of Recent Things

Within the last twenty years historians of science and technology have asked how a recent history might be written, and within the last ten interest has significantly increased, culminating in an online project at MIT. Since humanities computing owes its existence to developments in recent technology, and needs to become historically self-aware to be fully of the humanities, work toward an historiography of recent things is deeply relevant. In this essay I draw on this work to highlight the difficulties and opportunities of such an historiography, in particular its ethnographic character and the tempting lure of prediction. I focus on the crucial question of tacit object-knowledge, concluding that it is gained by concernful action. I recommend that we awaken from a progress-and-democratization chronicle to a genuine history of scholarly technology.

A Matter of Style

Few readers of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews will be unfamiliar with the oddities of disciplines other than their own. Richard Rorty, following Thomas Kuhn’s idea of ‘normal science’, gave the cause a name: he called it a discipline’s ‘normal discourse’. He defined a normal discourse as ‘that which is conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it’ (1979, 320). But, I wonder, can a discipline also be characterized by a style of writing which practitioners share (and enforce, e.g. through peer review)? I have in mind stylistic phenomena as minute as use of the first-person personal pronoun and contractions as well as colloquialisms and, on the large scale, signs or even discussion of the struggle that went into the writing. Bruno Latour (whose name may prove a stylistic test of another sort) argues that:

Getting There from Here

The text which follows was written as a lecture for a specific audience on a unique occasion, in a social setting that is now irretrievably gone. This setting allowed freedoms that are apt to seem out of place in the present context. But I exercised them for a reason which survives: in the spirit of Bruno Latour’s advice in ‘The Politics of Explanation’, to foreground the struggle of making an argument rather than to give an impression of having captured some truth or other (1988: 162–3). On behalf of digital humanities I wanted to foreground the poverty of language (some would say of theory, others of criticism) that for most if not all of its history has made this struggle so difficult. As Clifford Geertz said on behalf of anthropology, ‘We are reduced to insinuating theories because we lack the power to state them’ (1973: 24). Whether my suggestion of a language gains purchase among those for whom the lecture was written remains to be seen. I do not insist on it as the sole possibility or even the best. But I do insist that this poverty of language should rank first among items on the agenda to be addressed and that its solution is to be found by putting the field into its historical context.

ISR Guest Editorial

The collection of essays published here were first delivered in an invitational lecture series, ‘Digital scholarship, digital culture’, held at King’s College London from October 2003 to May 2004. The series was organised by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities to celebrate the humanities at King’s – to honour them in public (celebrare) by drawing attention to beginnings of a mutual transformation. That computing has affected the practices of scholarship is hardly news, though the systemwide effects can still surprise us. But, as Michael S. Mahoney points out,1 the notion of impact – or what I like to call the Billiard Ball Theory of History – construes these effects as if we had no say in them, as if they were not products of human invention but forces of nature and we the inert objects hit by them. Inventions are curious things, rarely if ever predictable in their outcomes. By Alan Turing’s design of a universal machine, computing is especially surprising, since within the frame of effective computability it can be put to any imaginable use. The question is not, ‘What are we doing with it and are likely to do with it?’ Rather we need to ask (with ambiguity intended), ‘What are we to make of it ? ’ This is also, Ian Hacking suggests,2 to ask, ‘What do we think we are because of it?’ The transformation goes both ways.

History and Human Nature

Abstract This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses.