Humanities computing: A plural community of method

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Humanities computingA plural community of method

• Dr Willard McCarty
• Reader in Humanities Computing
• Kings College London

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• Communities are to be distinguished by the
  style in which they are imagined. Benedict
  Anderson, Imagined Communities (rev edn, 1991)
  4.

Collective imagining takes shape through
discursive engagement among interlocutors in
contexts of varying structure, scope, and
formality. Discourse functions in this context
not as a vehicle for transmitting information and
beliefs but as a constitutive force. Robert
Asen, Imagining in the Public Sphere,
Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 349
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What I will talk about

• Humanities computing (the question)
  Humanities Computing (a response)
• The problem of method
• Anxieties about method in the humanities
• A quasi-Marxist lullaby
• Implications and opportunities

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1. Humanities Computing?

• The problem of method
• Anxieties about method
• A quasi-Marxist lullaby
• Implications and opportunities

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The question

• What happens when computing crosses paths with
  the humanities? What does our shared experience
  tell us?
• What sort of answer do we get when we dismiss the
  unfulfilled (and perhaps unfulfillable) promises,
  considering only what we now have and can do?
• What can we learn from the failures of computing
  to automate the humanities?
• What happens if we try not to close the gap
  between the humanities and computing but to
  develop and exploit it?

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My response
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The book

• Modelling on the central analytic purpose of
  computing for scholarship, namely developing
  recursive digital representations using them to
  illuminate the un(computationally)sayable
• Genre on the design of digital scholarly genres
  the library for them
• Discipline on disciplinarity and the
  ethnographic relation of humanities computing to
  the disciplines in its purview
• Computer science on CS as a disciplinary
  amalgam, its origins and relation to humanities
  computing
• Agenda on what is to be done in the field.

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Broader worries

• Professional. Looking toward computing from the
  disciplines, there are genuine worries the fate
  of conventional publishing the differential
  effects on disciplines, e.g. in relation to
  institutional priorities the attractiveness of
  computing to the best brightest as computer
  science becomes an ever broader church etc.
• Disciplinary. Far more important is a stylistic
  shift from an argumentative individualistic to
  a procedural formulaic epistemology in the
  humanities from a focus on individual cultural
  artefacts to a preoccupation with common
  regularities.

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2. The problem of method

• Humanities computing
• Anxieties about method
• A quasi-Marxist lullaby
• Implications and opportunities

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Method

• Method (Gk. µeta, above, at a higher level
  ?d??, way L. methodus, mode of proceeding).
• 1. A procedure for attaining an object.
  2.a. A way of doing anything, esp. according to
  a defined and regular plan. 3.a. A special
  form of procedure or characteristic set of
  procedures employed(more or less systematically)
  in an intellectual discipline or field of study
  as a mode of investigation and inquiry, or of
  teaching and exposition.
• Methodology (method ?????, study or
  discipline).1. Branch of knowledge dealing with
  method or with the methods of a particular
  discipline2. A dissertation on method3. A
  body of methods used in a discipline.
• Note how we tend to read these definitions, what
  we tend to assume our context of implementation.

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A prescient philosophers claim

• This is the age of methods, and the university
  that is to be the exponent of the living
  condition of the human mind, must be the
  university of methods. Charles Sanders
  Peirce, Introductory Lecture on the Study of
  Logic (1882)

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Strong reason for paying attention

• Excellence is an art won by training and
  habituation. We do not act rightly because we
  have virtue or excellence, but we rather have
  those because we have acted rightly. We are what
  we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act
  but a habit.
• Will Durant, Story of Philosophy (rev edn,
  1967) 61, summarizing an argument in
  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

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Method before methodology

• Intelligent practice is not a step-child of
  theory. Gilbert Ryle, Knowing how and
  knowing that, The Concept of Mind
  (2000/1949) 27-31
• Experimentation has a life of its own. Ian
  Hacking, Representing and intervening (1983) 150

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The question of method how do we know what we
know?

• Insofar as any epistemological question about
  the knowledge of humanists has been posed, it has
  centered on the objects of that knowledge But
  what about an epistemology based on the practices
  of humanists, on what they do?
• Lorraine Daston, Whither Critical
  Inquiry? Critical Inquiry 30 (2004) 363

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3. Anxieties about method

• Humanities computing
• The problem of method
• A quasi-Marxist lullaby
• Implications and opportunities

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Method in the humanities?

• Good scholarship may be methodical, but
  traditionally, in the humanities as we inherit
  them, methods serve as means to an end beyond
  method.
• The conventional goal is not to formulate common
  methods from a study of artefacts but, using this
  or that method as need be, to illuminate
  particular artifacts.

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Historical studies vs the sciences

• Historical research does not endeavor to grasp
  the concrete phenomenon as an instance of a
  universal rule Its ideal is rather to understand
  the phenomenon itself in its unique and
  historical concreteness. However much
  experiential universals are involved, the aim is
  not to confirm and extend these universalized
  experiences in order to obtain knowledge of a law
  how men, peoples, states evolve but to
  understand how this man, this people or this
  state is what it has become or, more generally,
  how it happened that it is so.
• Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Significance of the
  Humanist Tradition, in Truth and Method (2nd
  edn, 2000/1960) 4f

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The nomological vs the idiographic

• Thus Wilhelm Windelbands distinction of the
  nomothetic or law-seeking sciences from the
  idiographic or particularizing humanities (1894).
  
• Ernst Nagel explains the sciences seek to
  establish abstract general laws for indefinitely
  repeatable events and processes while the
  humanities aim to understand the unique and
  nonrecurrent (1961 547).

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Literary studies vs the sciences

• Science begins with the world we have to live
  in, accepting its data and trying to explain its
  laws. From there, it moves towards the
  imagination it becomes a mental construct, a
  model of a possible way of interpreting
  experience. Art, on the other hand, begins with
  the world we construct, not with the world we
  see. It starts with the imagination, and then
  works towards ordinary experience that is, it
  tries to make itself as convincing and
  recognizable as it can. (1963 6)
• Carlo Ginzburg The tendency to obliterate the
  individual traits of an object is directly
  proportional to the emotional distance of the
  observer. (1989/1986 12)

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mathematics
poetics
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So whats new?

• What disturbs this (un)comfortable
  compartmentalization into a two-cultured world? A
  very good, unanswered historical question but
  we know that computing is involved!
• How is it involved? What essential difference
  does it make?

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Two differences

• Ease of manipulation. Whatever is in software is
  easily changed in fact thats the whole
  point.Is it possible that software is not like
  anything else, that it is meant to be discarded
  that the whole point is to always see it as soap
  bubble? Alan Perlis, Epigram 74 (1982)
• Radically schematic representation. Whatever is
  put into software must be made absolutely
  consistent and completely explicit.

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Very big consequences

• A trade-off on the one hand, a radically crude
  analytic medium for representing cultural
  artefacts on the other hand, a powerful tool for
  manipulating their representations.
• A large gap between what one somehow knows and
  what one can describe computationally.
• A means of exploring the epistemological question
  (how we know what we know).

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The anxiety of mechanization

• The fear that because method focuses on common
  patterns and procedures that can be applied
  anywhere at any time, the humanities will be
  denatured.
• One response the question is first how we know
  what we somehow know, second whether what we
  think we know is justified true belief. The
  enquiry begins by privileging knowledge arrived
  at by means we may not be able to specify. Then
  we probe that knowledge.
• Another response broadly speaking, the alphabet
  is digital and the book is a machine to think
  with (I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary
  Criticism, p. 1). The humanities are founded on
  the ability to read book-machines. Now we need to
  learn how to read other sorts of machines.

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4. A quasi-Marxist lullaby

• Humanities computing
• The problem of method
• Anxieties about method
• Implications and opportunities

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A lullaby

• that soon computing will become simply how
  everything is done, so that humanities computing
  (whatever it is) will vanish, leaving the
  scholarly proletariat to rule

(or snooze).
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Its assumptions examined

• All scholarly work (outside the head) will soon
  be done by means of computing or significantly
  involve computing
• There is (or soon will be) one stable, relatively
  unchanging set of tools by which these things are
  done and so
• Ordinary academics will not need to devote
  attention to computing, or if they do, they will
  have the time and inclination for the job.

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Assumption that

• All scholarly work (outside the head) will soon
  be done by means of computing or significantly
  involve computing
• Quite possibly if not wholly, then mostly.

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Assumption that

• There is (or soon will be) one stable, relatively
  unchanging set of tools by which these things are
  done
• There is no evidence whatever for this
  millennarian assertion in fact we have strong
  theoretical reasons to think otherwise. The
  trajectory of development for computing would
  appear to be toward a stable basis for making and
  altering tools (at the level of work with which
  we are directly engaged). The gap between
  computational representation and human knowledge
  may be in motion but is in principle never to be
  closed. (See Gödels proof of truth beyond
  proof.)

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Assumption that

• Ordinary academics will not need to devote
  attention to computing, or if they do, they will
  have the time and inclination for the job.
• Attention will always have to be paid to the
  tools, and imaginatively from the tools to what
  might be done with them, to a degree
  unsupportable by ordinary non-specialists.
  Furthermore, humanities computing provides an
  extra-disciplinary scholarly basis from which to
  see to the interchange of methods between the
  disciplines. It provides for a genuine
  interdisciplinarity that informs current debate
  about how we organize ourselves. (As the term is
  ordinarily used, interdisciplinarity means
  little more than poaching.)

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What about computer science?

• Difficulty of the question CS is a complex
  amalgam of concerns the implications of calling
  it a science are unclear.
• Two simple statements about itNewell, Perlis
  and Simon CS is the study of computers and the
  varied, complex, rich phenomena surrounding
  them (Science 157, 1967 1373f).
• Denning The fundamental question underlying
  all computer science is what can be automated?
  (American Scientist 73, 1985 16).
• Humanities computing uses the products of
  computer science to focus on what cannot be
  automated (though cross-overs are both possible
  and most welcome).
• Hence humanities computer science, as at
  Cologne the highly technical work done e.g. at
  Kings College London the close relationship
  between humanities computing and extra-academic
  research.

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5. Implications opportunities

• Humanities computing
• The problem of method
• Anxieties about method
• A quasi-Marxist lullaby

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4. Implications and opportunities

• brought by institutional recognition of
  humanities computing as a semi-autonomous,
  extra-disciplinary, departmentalized practice
• For (more or less) traditional academics
• For institutions
• For the work

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Implications for traditional academics

• Liberty to focus on the motivating problem
• Collaborative interaction with methodologically
  sophisticated colleagues (who have no
  commitments, theoretical or otherwise, to ones
  field)
• Contact through such colleagues with parallel
  work in various other related disciplines
• An altogether better result!

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Implications for institutions

• A centre for interdepartmental coordination of
  parallel work, leading to the establishment of
  standards and much less needlessly duplicated
  effort
• Contact with the international community of those
  working in the digital humanities
• With the right division of labour, a significant
  source of grant-funds (though we must beware of
  the cash-cow problem).

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Implications for the work

• The methodological commons and all that it can
  bring
• The internalization of scientific methods, hence
  a more intimate interrelation of the humanities
  and the sciences.

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The methodological commons
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The internalization of scientific methods
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Discussion