Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 346.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 13:53:06 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: philosophy of humanities?
Dear Colleagues,
Recently I have been reading around in the history and philosophy of
science, noting parallels between the sciences, especially physics, and
humanities computing. These readings have convinced me that we have much to
learn from the historians and philosophers who have concerned themselves
with experimental, empirical research. I have been increasingly puzzled,
however, by the scanty attention that research in the humanities has
attracted from scholars in history and philosophy. Why is this so? Why now
that computing has become so important to humanities research does the need
for this attention seem (at least to me) so acute?
So far the only answer I have been able to manage points to the fact that
we must objectify our research methods before we can compute the artefacts
we study, and in so doing we bring out into the open what has formerly been
hidden from view. Hence as a direct consequence of humanities computing new
areas for historians and philosophers to study are opening up. Am I wrong
about this?
Part of the problem has been the attitude in the humanities by which the
physical bits and craftsmanship of research, its technology, are relegated
to a lesser status. (Do we smell here traces of the the old mind/body
problem, i.e. the pure mind vs the corrupt flesh?) Thus we do not have an
intellectual history of the concordance -- a badly needed study waiting to
be researched and written. Correct me if I am wrong, but is it not the case
that the history of the book, of the alphabet and alphabetization and
palaeography (with emphasis on the techniques by which letterforms were
produced) are typically marginalised subjects? Why is it -- correction
again most welcome -- that research methods courses are typically not given
much emphasis in our postgraduate/graduate programmes? Might this in part
be because so few of us, until we begin to compute our research, have any
idea of how we do what we do, and why?
Yours,
WM
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
voice: +44 (0)171 848 2784 fax: +44 (0)171 848 5081
<Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> <http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/>
maui gratia
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