Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 82.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 07:05:44 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: text & context from a computational perspective?
In the last chapter of The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987), Hayden White
has the following to say about the issues involved in rethinking
intellectual history:
>At the center of this set of themes is the crucial one, not only for
>intellectual historians but for historians of anything whatsoever, namely,
>that of the text-context relationship. What is this relationship? What,
>indeed, is a text -- an entity that once had an assuring solidity and
>concreteness, indeed a kind of identity that allowed it to serve as a
>model of whatever was comprehensible in both culture and nature. What
>happened to that text that used to lay before the scholar in a comforting
>materiality and possessed an authority that the "context" in which it had
>arisen and to the existence of which it attested could never have? Where
>is this context which literary historians used to invoke as a matter of
>course to "explain" the distinctive features of the poetic text and to
>anchor it in an ambience more solid than words? What are the dimensions
>and levels of this context? Where does it begin and end? And what is its
>status as a component of the historically real which it is the historian's
>purpose to identify if not to explain? The text-context relationship, once
>an unexamined presupposition of historical investigation, has become a
>problem, not in the sense of being simply difficult to establish by the
>once vaunted "rules of evidence," but rather in the sense of becoming
>"undecidable," elusive, uncreditable -- in the same way as the so-called
>rules of evidence. And yet this very undecidability of the question of
>where the text ends and the context begins and the nature of their
>relationship appears to be a cause for celebration, to provide a vista
>onto a new and more fruitful activity for the intellectual historian, to
>authorize a posture before the archive of history more dialogistic than
>analytic, more conversational than assertive and judgmental. ["The Context
>in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History", p. 186]
How do we in humanities computing respond to the "undecidable, elusive,
uncreditable" text-context relationship?
Yours,
WM
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
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