Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 351.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: "Prof. Roly Sussex" <sussex@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au> (24)
Subject: Re: 13.0346 history & philosophy of research?
[2] From: Steven Totosy <steven.totosy@ualberta.ca> (15)
Subject: the humanities
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 17:21:45 +0000
From: "Prof. Roly Sussex" <sussex@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au>
Subject: Re: 13.0346 history & philosophy of research?
Willard is quite right. Especially in the "high" humanities the
idea of "methodology" seems marginal: certainly it has a quite
different place from the social sciences, where published papers,
and grant applications, fail at once unless they have a competent
and comprehensive description of how the work's mechanics are
arganized. The relation between methodology and epistemology
is different in the social sciences, and in those areas of
Linguistics, especially text- and corpus-oriented linguistics,
where social science techniques are more prominent. There
would be few postgraduate courses in applied linguistics, for
instance, which do not have a subject on research methods and
methodology.
What is interesting about computational methods in language
research - sorry, ONE of the interesting things - is that these
methods are providing us with both a new methodology and a new
epistemology. The notion of "data" is undergoing a reworking.
Humanists are learning to interpret statistical reports on
what our software says the text is doing. This whole process
is tending to bring some areas of the Humanities closer to
questions of methodology in other disciplines, and indeed
to make the Humanities more scientific.
Roly Sussex
Centre for Language Teaching and Research
The University of Queensland
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 17:22:16 +0000
From: Steven Totosy <steven.totosy@ualberta.ca>
Subject: the humanities
your letter about shortcomings in the humanities, especially with regard to
the empirical, is unfortunately an important observation. i have been
working on and in this for a long time now and it is difficult with our
colleagues and with the field as a whole, indeed. on the other hand, there
are many of us who do recognize the importance of the issue and there is a
sizable corpus of work out there. for example, the approach i am pushing,
the systemic and empirical approach to literature and culture (based on an
array of other schools of thought such as radical constructivism and the
Empirische Literaturwissenschaft), is perhaps worth to look at. just go to
my journal, CLCWeb and its library (it has several bibliograophies in the
approach) at <http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/clcwebjournal/> (see also the
journal's aims and objectives, off its index page). best,
Steven Totosy
Editor, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal
<http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/clcwebjournal/>
-- CLCWeb 1.4 (December 1999) is online now --
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