Friends,

At the risk of deflecting attention from an
interesting and important thread, I want to
post here an interesting note from another list
on a topic of interest to us.

The question of how and why works of art (or
design) may or may not also consitute scholarship
is an issue of interest in several fields.

The post below comes from the Humanist
Discussion Group, a group organized around
computing in the humanities. This was posted
a few hours ago. If you want to follow the
response, visit their web sirte and subscribe.

It seems to me that Saul Ostrow's forthcoming
conference is an expression of renewed interest
in this problem, and it relates to many aspects of the
AHRC practice-led research review that Chris Rust
organized last year.

Yours,

Ken Friedman




Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 559.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html

www.princeton.edu/humanist/

Submit to: [log in to unmask]


Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2007 09:49:10 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: scholarly works of art


This in response to Wendell Piez's comments in Humanist 20.552.
Having assumed that computing is a suitable medium for scholarship,
he says,

"one then might ask why, if a word processor or set of hypertext
pages or series of graphs of word distribution is a suitable medium
for scholarship, a painting is not? Or another case, closer to the
boundaries: a series of photographs."

The answer is implied by the preposition in "a suitable medium FOR
scholarship" - i.e. FOR some intellectual operation in which the
photograph does not itself participate. One can easily imagine a
photograph serving as evidence for a scholarly argument - even if the
argument were implicit, and the photograph were offered as proof. But
what this line of reasoning (my own here, not Wendell's) takes for
granted is that scholarship is verbal argument, and that clearly does
not hold, e.g. in the case of a scholarly critical edition as a
whole, or a prosopographical database - or for a text-analysis
program?

The word "scholarship", according to the OED, means a scholar's
attainments, learning, erudition, also "the collective attainments of
scholars; the sphere of polite learning", which puts the idea in no
necessary relation to objects or concrete media of expression. (Those
who trouble to check the OED will discover that I just left out the
qualifying phrase, "esp. proficiency in the Greek and Latin languages
and their literature". Some will say, "Ah ha! Here's an old prejudice
hiding under the covers!") The suffix "-ship" indicates  a quality of
being ("the state or condition of being so-and-so"), not an object or
set of objects.

Is the crucial point, then, what we accept rather than what is? If it
can be shown that a particular style of work in a particular medium
advances our understanding of the questions that we care about, then
we admit the style? But this merely pushes the question onto the
acceptance that some activity advances understanding. How do we know
that?

Wendell goes on to say, in response to my question of when we accept
an algorithm and start working with what it generates,

"To me it appears the question here is not 'when do we accept it' but
'what do we accept it to be?' Is it more interesting and illuminating
for its transparency or opacity?"

Depends on what we have in mind, I suppose. At one moment we use a
long piece of strong wood to lift a weight and think nothing at all
about the piece of wood. Then we notice that something interesting is
going on, examine it and derive a theory about levers, which is so
successful that we cease being interested in such things and just use
them - perhaps teach the theory of levers to the young but otherwise
pay little attention. Then we find that the lever provides a very
powerful analogy for something we don't understand as well, and so we
pay new attention to the theory of levers to make sure of the
analogy. In most areas of life there's clearly a cumulative effect, a
sense of progress that is real and whose fruits we depend on. But in
the humanities and in the sciences, the line is never a straight one.
It's always got enough of a twist in it to make it a spiral. At any
moment we have to be able to go back to beginnings, to open the black
box, inspect the contents and rejigg them.

This is why, I keep thinking, that the most important matter of
computing is the ability to change what we have, quickly, easily as
possible, at least from the point of which we regard its embedded
knowledge as interpretative. Is this a matter of the scale at which
we are able to regard the software artefact as intelligible?

Comments?

Yours,

WM

Dr Willard McCarty
Reader in Humanities Computing
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London

http://staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/