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/