Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 22.
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: Thu, 18 May 2000 07:39:47 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: the ABCs, simple answers, home truths
Dear Colleagues,
As we seem rapidly to be pulling away from the necessity of instilling
skills and to be reaching a high-ground of more interesting research
questions of our own, what is happening to our introductory courses,
lectures, workshops and the like?
I raise the question primarily because when I think about my early
experiences in university I recall having a particular kind of
knowledge-hunger, the satisfactions of which remain vivid in memory as
formative points of my intellectual life. I would hope we all have such
anecdotes as I could recall at length, for example of the showman-professor
of chemistry who charmed all 500 of us into a desire to study his subject,
in effect by demonstrating his excitement and love of it. Perhaps I am just
an incurable romantic, but attempting for the moment to be as sober as
possible ("damn braces, bless relaxes"), I still think that no utilitarian
lecture on the usefulness of chemistry in modern life and how it increased
one's chances for a job would have worked even remotely as well as the
professor's demonstrations of intelligent love. And I hope very much this
is the general case now, that underneath the worries about jobs, investment
profiles and retirement plans that knowledge-hunger still gnaws as strongly
as ever.
Let us say (cheer me and yourself up, please!) that our students and
colleagues are still thus ravenous. The question, somewhat refined, is: how
do we computing humanists appeal to their knowledge-hunger? What do we
teach, how do we teach it, in order to demonstrate in plain terms what
humanities computing is all about?
I think it's rather easier to reach the specialist than the beginner. As a
teacher of mine once said, "In the mind of the beginner there are many
possibilities, in the mind of the expert there are few." The intelligent,
curious beginner wants to know the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the
disciplinary promised land one is travelling toward, has to be convinced
that life there will be worth all that it takes to reach it. (As in the
biblical original, it's difficult to keep the faith between original vision
and arrival.) The specialist, who is already committed to the game, will
not tend to ask the really hard questions. Of course the beginner and the
expert are not necessarily different people. I'm also asking about how to
reach the beginner in the expert.
A related problem is how to explain what we do to those who are not our
students -- the neighbour, local baker et al. pose this problem in an even
more difficult form than the funding-body officer or dean. As background
allow me to observe the general loss of superstitious reverence for higher
education in the last 2-3 generations. Be that as it may, however, let's
keep away from o-tempora-o-mores whingeing and get to what centrally we
say, in plain language, humanities computing is for. And by "plain
language" I mean not just simple English or whatever, but language devoid
of promotionalism and dodgy appeals to the future. What have we got to
offer right now, with the tools we have in hand, to the ordinary curious
person?
Comments?
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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 18 2000 - 06:51:31 CUT