[Humanist] 22.614 looking back
Humanist Discussion Group
willard.mccarty at mccarty.org.uk
Thu Mar 12 10:24:25 CET 2009
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 22, No. 614.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist
Submit to: humanist at lists.digitalhumanities.org
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:16:21 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty at mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: Re: why looking back?
In Humanist 22.609, Renata Lemos asked me directly about the purpose
behind several recent postings of mine, specifically
> why is it that you are looking to the past when you search for answers
> concerning the future. do you really believe that such answers could be
> found there? it seems to me that it would be a much more interesting and
> fruitful endeavor to look for answers in what is happening in the
> present, namely the very interesting developments in nanotechnologies,
> namely nanocommunication and quantum information processing... things
> that you insist on calling "hype".
>
> I truly do not understand what is so important about the past, when our
> present is so much more exciting and so much more relevant.
I can think of two kinds of responses to this, one having to do with us
all, the other specific to practice in the digital humanities. The
first is a question not just for historians, though I suppose they do
what they do based on a very old understanding of why the past is
always relevant to us humans. I imagine that it's the sort of question
an historian might expect to get in a taxi on the way to the airport,
say, or at the hairdresser's.
I guess if I were an historian I'd ask the questioner to imagine the
circumstances under which knowledge of the past would be totally,
completely, utterly unnecessary. I'd guess that if you kept at it
relentlessly (that's the key to this reductio ad absurdum) you'd end up
imagining an edenic state of total bliss and complete enlightenment --
not only for yourself but for everyone else (since Eden cannot be a
gated community). No need to understand what happened yesterday, or
indeed 5 minutes ago, because the present is only good -- indeed the
present is eternal. No need to remember how to string a bow, plant a
crop etc etc. Anything less than Eden, such as the state we're in, and
there have to be questions from perplexity, questions of the
where-from-here kind, since here is for most of us most of the time, if
not all of us all the time, not exactly where we want to be if we have
any imagination at all. Such questions would lead the clever person to
look to the past for better knowledge of the present and so guidance
for what we have at hand to build a better future. And assuming that
not everything is under one's own control, as it isn't in the
sub-edenic state, these questions would include the where-are-we-going
kind too, i.e. what trajectory all of us are on whatever the individual
may decide to do, which requires knowledge of where we've been, at what
speed and rate of change, and so by something analogous to intertia,
where we're likely to end. It's against that inertia that we steer our
course.
One can imagine situations (for example, the situation many people found
themselves in after the Second World War, or others later who managed
to survive whatever killing fields) in which the past is so horrible
that learning from it seems impossible even if it were psychologically
supportable to make the attempt. Or, to take another example,
revolutionaries right after a great revolution, such as the Russian one,
for whom the past is meaningless, a nightmare from which one is
awakening. Or, to modulate into the techno-scientific, one can cite a
Kuhnian scientific revolution, such as the Einsteinian one. But what do
we think now, e.g. about proposals to destroy all musical instruments?
Once the pain or fervour abates, don't we turn to the past for
understanding of the past? Even in the case of the profound changes in
physics because of Einstein, we now understand not just that Newtonian
physics is of the good-enough kind but also the principle of emergent
order that marks the boundaries of its relevance. Where would we be if
we had tossed out Newton entirely?
Is this the sort of argument that an historian would give to the taxi
driver or hairdresser -- if that historian had a long enough ride?
I suppose for an academic or technician in the digital humanities, one
takes that broad situation and applies it. Take text-analysis, for
example. As a whole text-analysis isn't terribly successful or
satisfying, as many others in the field keep saying, and have said year
after year since the early 1960s. Indeed, the postgraduate course in
text-analysis that I teach is based on the question of why it is we
(firmly in the present, with eyes fixed on the then present moment) run
unto a metaphorical brick wall so soon after getting started; or less
metaphorically, how we can get beyond the level of the individual word
and individual words nearby, lemmatized or otherwise, to whatever it is
that could be considered "context"; or, more philosophically, how we
can possibly justify what we consider "context" to mean in any given
textual situation. Most other activities in the digital humanities seem
to be cooking with gas -- though I would argue that they're cooking the
low-hanging fruit-- but digital literary studies not -- because, I would
argue, we cooked all the low-hanging stuff quite a long time ago and
are now trying to figure out how to build a ladder to reach the
higher-hanging stuff. We also speak at length these days about "digital
editions" but, according to those in the midst of the editing trade,
don't really know what one of these creatures should be like.
So the literary critic or textual editor, focused on interpretation of
texts, doesn't find him- or herself in a particularly good situation
with respect to computing. Yet at the same time, let us say, he or she
has this nagging feeling that the computer really could be useful,
somehow. And, let us say, this critic, firmly in the present moment,
has ideas about what went wrong and might be done about it. Isn't it
important at such a moment to know what's been tried already? Isn't it
equally or more important to be able to extrapolate from the trajectory
that text-analysis, say, has taken all these years to where now it
makes sense to go? If we're going to blame Chomskyan linguistics or
Theory or whatever for the ineffectuality of text-analytic approaches to
literature, we may be able to make a plausible case, but based
essentially on a causal argument, it is a naive one, as awareness of the
last 60+ years of text-analysis clearly demonstrates. As Anthony Kenny
suggested rather obliquely in his 1991 British Library lecture, we
should be thinking in terms of coeval developments rather than causal
chains.
Nanotechnology or any other technology isn't itself hype, but there is
much hype surrounding it that takes possibilities as inevitabilities if
not present reality and asks us to suspend judgement. As awareness of
those last 60+ years will show again and again, this sort of promotional
blather has come in waves repeatedly, always casting up on the shore
much more modest achievements than have been predicted. I say, let's
think now about what we have now (in the light of the past, of course).
Comments?
renata lemos wrote:
> cher willard,
> from your recent posts on humanist, I have been wondering why is it that you
> are looking to the past when you search for answers concerning the future.
> do you really believe that such answers could be found there? it seems to me
> that it would be a much more interesting and fruitful endeavor to look for
> answers in what is happening in the present, namely the very interesting
> developments in nanotechnologies, namely nanocommunication and quantum
> information processing... things that you insist on calling "hype".
>
> I truly do not understand what is so important about the past, when our
> present is so much more exciting and so much more relevant.
>
> comments?
>
> yours,
--
Willard McCarty, Professor of Humanities Computing,
King's College London, staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/;
Editor, Humanist, www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist;
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, www.isr-journal.org.
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