Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 89.
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: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 08:12:32 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: thoughts on commentaries & humanities computing
To my request for thought-experimenters in Humanist 14.73 there may have
been many responses, but none (except for Prof Dr Ott's) have
actually-virtually come across my desk and so been published here. (I was
going to write "actually come across my virtual desk" when I realised that
the desk is quite solid; it's the coming across that requires the
qualification, which I am tempted to expand into a not irrelevant
meditation on the philosophy of science, but won't :-). One member of this
group asked for a summary of Glenn Most's book, Commentaries -- Kommentare,
which I mentioned as a good source for thoughts on the commentary form, but
I didn't respond because this would have required days of work. However a
search of the very fine Bryn Mawr Classical Review
<http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/> reveals a solid piece on the book by
James O'Donnell, <http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2000/2000-05-19.html>,
distinguished author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace
(Harvard, 1998) -- read it tonight!
Nevertheless I thought I'd set out some desultory, scattered (and doubtless
flawed) thoughts provoked by the essays collected in Most's book, in order
myself to provoke the silent thought-experimenters into at least the same
if not better. It seems to me that the problem of what we might do with the
commentary in the electronic medium is made to order for us computing
humanists. Considering it is, among other things, a way of defining our
common perspective on research in the humanities. That someone like me, who
is little better than a scholarly tourist in nearly all of the fields,
traditions and historical periods covered by Most's book, can sustain a
professional interest is remarkable. (Kind wit, be silent!) I think sorting
out what across such essays proves relevant, what irrelevant to the
computational transformation of the genre provides a very good way of
expanding that "remarkable" beyond the phatic moment (and out of wit's
grasp) into a realisation of what we're about.
The editor, Professor Most (Greek, Heidelberg/Chicago), worries at the
beginning about how to define what a commentary is; he notes the
possibility of a definition by formal properties -- chiefly the
subordination of one text to another -- "X is a commentary *on* Y -- but
rejects that because it does not distinguish between a genuine commentary
and a parody (he mentions Nabokov's Pale Fire; see also Lee Siegel's
delightful, even useful Love in a Dead Language
<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/756971.html>). It seems to me
that formal properties are exactly what we have to think about, and that
whether something is a "genuine" commentary or a parody matters not a whit
to us. But what might these properties be? Subordination collapses or has
to be qualified into near meaninglessness quite quickly, as there are
clearly "non-submissive" commentaries in which the commented text is little
more than an occasion for the commentary, and even more radically (as could
be argued about the proto-typological connections within the Hebrew Bible
and about Galen on Hippocrates) the very act of commenting on can be said
to create the authority of the text commented on, if not come close to
create it as a text. It may be, Vallence writes, that Hippocrates was the
only great authority nebulous and distant enough for Galen to tolerate;
source-criticism on the Bible seems to me to drive us to the same conclusion.
Another important qualification is provided by Daniel Boyarin's essay on
Midrash as commentary, in which he points out that interpretation defines
only one kind of commentary. If, as in Midrash, the Platonic/Orphic notion
of soul distinct from body -- and thus meaning from text -- does not
operate, even provisionally, then the act of commenting on is made even
more problematic than we may have thought. Simon Goldhill says in his own
essay that the commentary form depends on philosophical ideas about
language (and literature). He asks, where is the meaning in a theatrical or
textual event? This is the sort of question we ask. "The words of the Torah
are poor in their place, and rich in another context."
An interdisciplinary, trans-historical examination of commentaries, like
one of concordances, is an exercise that drives one to the brink of
silence: it seems as if almost anything can be called a "commentary".
Somewhat less vaguely, as a genre it seems to slip easily from the form a
classicist would recognise as such (e.g. Dodds on Euripides Bacchae, Nisbet
and Hubbard on Horace) to the interpretative essay, the new composition,
the translation and the lexicon. Here Goldhill's approach I find especially
helpful: he defines the genre by the operation of two principles: citation
and morselisation. The genre is driven, with tighter or looser focus, by
the (not necessarily subordinating) reference ad loc., which implies a
synchronic view of the text and which, as Fowler notes in his essay, means
the recontextualisation of the referenced morsel.
Referencing and the recontextualising of data-morsels should be immediately
recognisable as operations that computing is well suited for. Fowler
helpfully runs through a number of possibilities that computing suggests,
one of which is the dynamic creation of many different kinds of commentary
from the same body of material (e.g. the now bog-standard notion of
suppressing or revealing material as the user wishes). More radical is the
idea of creating a commentary by assembling morsels not originally made for
the purpose, e.g. my colleague David Yeandle's project to create a
commentary on Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival from bibliographical
references to discussions of individual passages -- his
"Stellenbibliographie zum Parzival Wolframs von Eschenbach", for which see
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/german/parzdescr.htm> (German
version also available).
So, we let 100 flowers bloom, but as computing humanists we study the
mechanics of blooming. Goldhill's social constructivist perspective on the
commentary tradition reminds me of what Ian Hacking, quoting Nietzsche,
says about "unwrapping the mummy of science" to see it as an historical
process. Hacking points out, in The Social Construction of What? (Harvard,
1999) that to see something as "constructed" can be liberating, as
constructivism tells us that the constructed thing does not have to be the
way it now is, or is regarded. We are constructors; can we be liberating?
Goldhill asks, is it possible to have a commentary that pays attention to
the modern ideas of a plural text, that is not integrally related to
discredited ideas about language? It seems to me that here is a
paradigmatic problem for humanities computing and that arriving at the
point of formulating it (however crudely managed here) holds a mirror up to
the field.
Comments?
Yours,
WM
: how we sort relevant from irrelevant . Apart from Reading the fat volume
of learned essays, dealing with the genre in several traditions and
historical periods (within most of which I am little more than a scholarly
tourist), I found myself
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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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