Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 39.
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, 27 May 2000 09:06:20 +0100
From: John Lavagnino <John.Lavagnino@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: Humanities computing colloquium at King's College London:
a report
On May 13, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's
College London held a colloquium entitled Humanities Computing: Formal
Methods, Experimental Practice: an occasion to think about the
subject's fundamentals once again, and consider how we might best
conceptualize the application of computing to the humanities. The
colloquium's speakers included a philosopher of science, a sociologist
of science, a literary critic, a theoretician and philologist, and a
director of a humanities computing research institute; the plan was to
consider analogies with scientific practice, and perspectives from the
history, sociology, and philosophy of science. These are areas of
study that have been very active intellectually in recent years, and
they did turn out to offer many valuable ideas.
Current work in a number of scientific fields, notably artificial
intelligence and evolutionary psychology, purports to overlap with
some aspects of the humanities. But scholars in the humanities
generally remain unconvinced that these fields offer much of interest
to them. It is still the case that the project of artificial
intelligence, that of getting computers to exhibit or understand human
behaviour, is an extremely difficult one that has not progressed very
far. That was one point that Harry Collins, of the University of
Cardiff, made in his paper. He borrowed an analogy from Hubert
Dreyfus: to say that AI has progressed a long way is like standing on
a chair and saying you've made real progress in getting to the
moon. Machines have problems above all in dealing with ambiguity, in
understanding what words or images mean in the light of their context;
ambiguities that we negotiate without effort in daily life remain
difficult or impossible for computers to manage, and these are nothing
compared to the problems scholars face. Our task, then, is to develop
ways to get computers to do useful work for us in the humanities, ways
that don't involve teaching them to speak our language.
A common and often successful approach has been to subject our primary
sources to formalization. A historian understands that elementary
facts such as names and dates may be uncertain or speculative to
different degrees, depending on the evidence behind them; one major
task for a project like the Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire at
King's is to create definite and not too misleading versions of such
facts that can then be organized and sifted with the computer's
aid. Tito Orlandi, of the University of Rome, presented the argument
for taking such formalization seriously: for confronting the
deep-seated difficulties in moving from the continuous realm of human
experience to the digitized world, but also for seeing the process of
formalization not just as a practical chore but instead as an
opportunity to think through the foundations of our subjects. The
proposal met with, and clearly will generally meet with, a very mixed
reaction: although there is formalization in every humanities field to
some extent, and was even before the days of computing, it is often
distant from urgent concerns; what is foundational needs to be
consensual, but disagreements matter more than consensus in many
circles.
Even given the assumption that, in a humanities-computing project, the
goal of formalization is to create something that makes certain
practical operations possible, and not to capture the fullness of
anyone's understanding of the objects under study, there is often
discomfort with the process and difficulty in finding any level of
agreement. Jerome McGann, of the University of Virginia, proposed a
concentration instead on the failures of computing, on the distortions
they inevitably introduce into texts and images, as a defamiliarizing
technique to heighten our attention---rather on the model of exercises
that are common in writing or acting workshops. Such approaches may
prove to be the principal application of computing for interpretative
work focused on small numbers of images or texts: where the power of
computing to marshal large amounts of information is not really
required, methods which change the individual interpreter's
perceptions become most significant, and the restrictions that
formalization entails seem less acceptable.
Hasok Chang of University College London spoke on approaches to
understanding scientific experiments, and this was highly relevant to
reflection on the range of methods being set out, from formalization
to distortion. An experiment can be seen as a test or as a tentative
effort---or as many other things; and experimentation can become an
activity of its own, pursued by a community separate from that of
theoretical scientists, though of course related. Experiments may seek
to collect data on phenomena in nature, but they also may work to
varying extents to make phenomena happen in order to be studied. And
alongside the theoretical and experimental communities there is also
the community of instrument-makers, who themselves have practices and
interests not fully apprehended by others in the same scientific
field; this practice of instrument-making may offer the best analogy
for what computing humanists do, and certainly a novel one in fields
that often barely conceive of themselves as using instruments or
equipment of any kind.
John Unsworth, of the University of Virginia, took a broader view of
the whole activity of the humanities, in an attempt to isolate basic
operations that most of us do. More than any of the other papers, his
put the focus on collaborative work and not just modelling or
analysis. The World Wide Web, for all its many shortcomings, has
proven a powerful tool for scholars, and what we ought to do is try to
develop further its potential for communication and collaboration.
The colloquium's web page, with links to further resources on the
subject, will remain available, at
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/seminar/99-00/seminar_hc.html>.
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