Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 1.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Sun, 07 May 2000 19:47:35 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: HAPPY now we are 13 BIRTHDAY
Dear Colleagues:
Thirteen years ago today Humanist began as an experiment on the strength of an
inspiration that somehow something good would come of it. Many good things
have, for me the most important of them quite unexpectedly. You may not
count these yearly editorial ruminations among those good things :-), but I
do hope that you, like me, welcome the chance to stop for a moment and
think about Humanist in the context of our field(s) of activity and the
loosely bound, widely distributed community of people -- some of them of
long-standing, some of them new and, alas, some of them gone -- that
Humanist has helped to define. None of us has the time to review the past
year-in-Humanist, and I trust none is so foolish as to attempt prediction
of the one we begin today. I'll certainly do neither. Cook's privilege is
to taste the cooking, editor's to say whatever he or she likes. Permit me
to combine those roles in a very personal way. I often think that what I do
under the rubric of editor is to stir the pot, so here goes.
Permit me also, please, to draw on experience without your attributing to
the act the qualities of age that may seem inseparable from it. Especially
the greybeardedness. That colour and my beard are not unrelated, but the
sedentary gravitas and settled authority that greybeards can so easily put
on I find personally dead wrong and professionally suicidal. I hope that
it's entirely unnecessary to say that the joy of being alive is simply too
unsettling to make greybeardedness an attractive mental state, or as my
poet Ovid wrote about a not entirely dissimilar situation, "non bene
conveniunt nec in una sede morantur / maiestas et amor..." (Met 2.846f). As
for our field, it changes too quickly. New vistas -- such as new media
studies, now not so new -- open up, and suddenly we need to reconfigure
what we think and how we think, publish and teach it. Greybeards are likely
to end up, to quote Peter Batke, feeling as if they're sitting in the
middle of the road with tire tracks up their back.
Perhaps the most valuable thing I can say about the very beginning of
Humanist is the autobiographical fact of its originating inspiration. It
came to me, suddenly in a meeting of like-minded, more or less unrecognised
and quite disgruntled academics 13 years ago, that there was 'something for
me' in the effort to bring us together and define what we were doing -- no
more, really, than a whiff of something good on the wind. I think the
professional analogue to this personal incident and the crucial role of
sudden inspiration in my life that it points to is, again, the vital
necessity for our being alert. We're not at the bleeding edge of
technological developments, thank God, but as new things come over the
horizon we have but a short time to see what we might adopt, adapt or take
note of for our colleagues in the humanities and for our students.
The most valuable thing I can say about the practice of editing Humanist is
again to quote the Hebrew proverb, "Do what you do only out of love." If
years ago I'd had sight of the future, and I'd seen what good things
Humanist would do for me professionally, I might have been irresistibly
tempted to go for it out of hope for professional advancement etc., but
blessed blindness to the future saved me from being tested and very likely
found wanting. By the time it became clear that Humanist would be useful in
that way my love for it was too strong to be unseated by those strange
gods. In any case, the privilege of being involved through Humanist in the
beginnings of humanities computing is very great indeed, and I can only be
profoundly grateful.
Many are to thank -- some who have helped deliberately, others accidentally
and a few who intended a rather different result and taught important
lessons thereby. Allow me, however, for the first time to dedicate the
moment to Don Fowler, late of Jesus College Oxford, who was just the sort
of colleague and friend we need to remind us of why we do this thing and
why greybeardedness is not to die for. "Therefore choose life!"
Many thanks.
Yours,
WM
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
voice: +44 (0)20 7848 2784 fax: +44 (0)20 7848 5081
<Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> <http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/>
maui gratias agere
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