Please forgive what may be a terribly naive question from someone new to this discussion group.
I am studying a recent historical period, ca. 1950-1980, when computers were first being used by a relatively small band of literary and textual scholars. In one of the typical surveys of activity, classicist Robert Connor struggled in 1991 with the question of why computing had made so little difference to his discipline despite considerable activity and seemingly universal approbation. "My suspicion", he wrote, "is that the computer technology became available precisely at the wrong moment in the profession's development. The era of traditional lexical and textual studies had largely passed.... The energy of North American classicists, by and large, has concentrated on interpretative questions.... Literary criticism, for example, turned away [from the kinds of interests with which computers could help].... In historical studies too the times were out of joint...." ("Scholarship and Technology in Classical Studies", in Scholarship and Technology in the Humanities, ed. May Katzen. London: British Library, 1991).
Another example from the same period is provided by the enthusiastic lunge for being "scientific" that gripped some of these scholars ca mid 1960s, at the very time when (note the qualifying phrase) the historicisation of the sciences was gathering force. The revolution provoked by The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was not entirely to Kuhn's liking, I understand, but for my purposes that doesn't matter. What does matter is that quite suddenly, just as computer-using humanists thought that at last they could become scientific, and so share the mandate of heaven, others were lunging in the opposite direction.
Both examples are meant here *as examples* of nearly simultaneous developments at cross-purposes that raise the question of how such divergent events are related. Anthony Kenny, in a 1992 British Library lecture and a number of times later, speculated in respect of my first example that literary and historical scholars ran in the opposite direction as computing came in because computing was associated with the juggernaut of quantification (and much else repellent to scholars). This seems plausible. But I wonder: is this causal explanation too tidy? If one came up with several causes would that be any better? I have the feeling that it wouldn't, that it would verge on Richard Hofstadter's "paranoid history" by explaining too much. But I want an explanation!
So I am looking for historiographical studies of such at-the-very-time-when situations that are not simply causal or purely accidental. I want to know how to open up these examples of mine rather than shut them down. All help will be greatly appreciated.
Yours,
WM
www.mccarty.org.uk/
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