Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 34, No. 116.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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        Date: 2020-06-16 08:06:30+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty 
        Subject: your cup of tea?

For some here certain subjects are just their cup of tea, for example,
textual markup, and nothing makes the tea more stimulating than
immersion of highly technical language, replete with acronyms and terms
never before known to humankind. For others here, eyes glaze over (or
cross), head begins to ache and other physiological signs of mental
distress quickly develop. Ah, but tables can so easily be turned, yes?

My suggestion is this: that wherever, whenever possible, the specialist
finds a common ground in which the specialism of the moment is located
and works that, at least for a bit, indicating what more inclusive
problems are stirred up or informed by the minority concerns. I offer as
example Oulipian mathematician Claude Berge's Principles of
Combinatorics (1971, originally, Principes de Combinatoire), in the 
English edition with a helpful introduction by Gian-Carlo Rota. 
Berge (who was also Chaire de Calcul des Probabilités et Physique 
Mathématique, Université de Paris) explains with marvellous clarity 
why we should be interested -- as indeed I now am -- before diving into 
the mathematics that he so passionately loved.

Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/),
Professor emeritus, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College
London; Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews
(www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20) and Humanist (www.dhhumanist.org)




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Editor: Willard McCarty (King's College London, U.K.; Western Sydney University, Australia)
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