Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 73.
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, 22 Jun 2000 07:56:46 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: a thought-experiment
I'd like to ask if those members of Humanist with some experience of both
computing and commentaries, glossaries and related scholarly tools would
help me out by conducting a thought experiment and publishing the results
to Humanist.
So, here's the experiment. Suppose that you could materialise an ideal
commentary for whatever text or texts are central to your intellectual
life. What would it be like? Constrain your imagination not by what our
computing tools presently do, and what ancillary materials currently exist
in electronic form, but exclude magic as well as fantasies, such as in Star
Trek. (So, no manuscript replicators, please, no beaming up the entire mss
collection of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin!) Concentrate, if you will,
not so much on what our gizmos can do, rather on those aspects of the
commentary form that in your use or writing of commentaries have frustrated
some scholarly impulse.
One thing this thought-experiment implies is that you start with an idea of
what a commentary is, i.e. what defines the genre. Not a simple question,
because the commentary form is radically contingent on its varying social
and cultural context -- to a greater degree than many of us realise. (For
those who are interested, see Glenn Most, ed., Commentaries -- Kommentare,
Goettingen, 1999.) So it would be helpful if you'd say what you think a
commentary is, and then go on to question how its ontology might be altered
in the electronic media. Again, though, please focus your remarks on what
you might want or can see others wanting rather than just the untrammelled
possibilities offered e.g. by hypertext/hypermedia.
Which is to say, imagine the lineaments of satisfied desire for the
commentary and tell us what you see.
Many thanks.
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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