Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 192.
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: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com> (48)
Subject: Re: 14.0180 machines, pride and pure research?
[2] From: Mark Wolff <WolffM0@hartwick.edu> (118)
Subject: academy vs. coporations
[3] From: "Chris McMahon" <pharmakeus@hotmail.com> (29)
Subject: Re: 14.0187 machines & pride, cyberspace
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 06:55:25 +0100
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com>
Subject: Re: 14.0180 machines, pride and pure research?
At 08:32 AM 8/19/00 +0100, you wrote:
>If research of the undirected kind (a.k.a. "pure") requires the cloudy
>state of mind, then how does research in our area get done in the real
>world, where funding is required and available largely from people who want
>products guaranteed?
Often, by accident. The products are guaranteed, but not delivered. Careers
rise and fall, not entirely on the basis of guarantees made and fulfilled.
Some products are guaranteed and even delivered, but do not serve:
situations change: the new VP just doesn't care about his predecessor's
hobby horse or white elephant. Some products serve, but in ways not
anticipated. The only thing that doesn't change is that the developer who
explicitly pitches "I don't know how this will be useful, but someone will
find some way," never gets a shot.
Yet some dreams, some requirements, never go away. Thomas Jefferson got the
notion from France that interchangeable parts for firearms would be a good
thing on a battlefield. He wasn't the only one, and the federal government
funded these projects constantly and repeatedly, through one failure after
another, each project saying "he got it wrong, but I can do it." Only after
fifty years did they really have parts that were semi-reliably
interchangeable (and then, just for one line of rifles); and they had to
invent a completely new way of building and running assembly lines -- the
"American System" (as it was called) -- in order to do it. The idea was
just too good to die.
Pure research? My guess is, the private sector has never been too keen on
this. Sometimes, after a fortune has been made, a tycoon will reflect, and
some pure research will be funded. (Mellon, Carnegie.) But usually the pure
research happens on the sly, in other guises. Often the company that funded
the pure research never gets to benefit, as when Xerox let the mouse escape
from its PARC.
So yes, it's pride that drives it. The researcher must appeal to the pride
of the funder. No less in the private sector than anywhere.
Only when research gets to be statistically predictable (X projects funded
will yield Y results, though we don't know in advance which of the X they
will be), as may be happening in the pharmaceutical industry, does it
stabilize. If Y is greater than X, X will be funded; otherwise, not. But
I'm not sure we want to be in that particular place, where methodologies
themselves are necessarily concrete.
Cheers,
Wendell
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Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 06:57:32 +0100
From: Mark Wolff <WolffM0@hartwick.edu>
Subject: academy vs. coporations
Thanks for your posting, Chris. I agree that we probably agree, and
that if anything we are quibbling over details. I also agree that we
should make the academy more of a public sphere where new ways of doing
things and seeing the world, especially through technology, break down
the institutional and economic barriers that want to reduce capital to
money.
> I would like to ask you what sort of project you suggest for overcoming the
> conquest of the academy by corporatism?
It's not that I want to return to the good ol' days of the ivory tower
where scholars mused over their books and left the practical concerns of
life to lesser mortals. As if that ever happened. Instead, I would
like to see humanities computing develop its own habitus within the
academy. To foster this, humanities scholars must have the freedom to
engage in "pure" research, research that does not have any end in sight
except the discovery of new ideas and methods that *may* prove useful
later on. This is not a new idea, and in fact it does not even belong
exclusively to the academy. Many corporations have established
facilities such as Bell Labs and Xerox Park where researchers have the
"luxury" to "play" with new ideas. Corporations know that most research
projects end up going nowhere, but every now and then there is a project
that serves as the basis for the next revolutionary technology. I would
say that all academics, whether they teach French or Computer Science,
must have time to practice the excess of research, otherwise they become
service professionals. Graduate students in the humanities spend a good
chunk of time learning the ropes of academic research: they think up
projects, look up materials and do some preliminary research, and decide
(with the help of an advisor) whether a project is both feasible and
worth doing. A lot of these projects are dead ends, but one often
learns more from failures than from successes. The experience of
failure is necessary to scholarship, something that may seem wasteful in
a money-driven economy but fruitful if one considers the knowledge and
wisdom gained through the experience. What holds true for scholars in
other academic disciplines should hold true for humanities computing:
one should have the freedom and motivation to do research without an
imposed goal or timeframe (there is, of course, the publish-or-perish
mandate, but the scholar is free to decide *what* to publish, even if
the publication describes a research failure).
Speaking from my own experience, I think humanities computing research
is threatened, not because scholars aren't busy pursuing research, but
because information technology is too profitable to be left in the hands
of humanities scholars. There was a row about ten years ago over the
obscurity of humanities computing research. I don't want to rehearse
those debates again (ping Mark Olsen), but I think the struggle has
shifted. Ten years ago there was no World Wide Web. Humanities
computing scholarship (as well as a lot of more traditional research)
was inconsequential within the wider public sphere. With the rise of
Internet culture, however, anyone with a networked computer at home can
take a break from shopping at Amazon.com and access a SGML-encoded
version of Shelley's Frankenstein. Now *everybody* cares about document
encoding and retrieval, whether they realize it or not. Humanities
computing scholarship is no longer irrelevant to the wider public, but
because there is so much interest in it now it risks losing whatever
academic autonomy it had gained to demands for productivity. There are
great opportunities for humanities computing as a service industry, and
indeed many colleges and universities rely on humanities computing
specialists to build their institutional web sites and distance learning
programs. I myself managed to stay in graduate school because of the
services I was able to provide my university. However, it is my
impression that the idea of humanities computing research, which
involves using time and resources to pursue ideas that may not produce
anything other than greater knowledge and wisdom, is discouraged within
many institutions, not only because of limited time and resources, but
because within the public sphere we have jumped from information
technology as a curiosity in the humanities to a piece of
mission-critical infrastructure. Because institutions rely on
information technology to do their business, they feel compelled to seek
the most efficient and productive means to meet their needs. Hence the
tendancy toward commercial software and data products that allow
institutions to meet the demand for information without all the waste of
research. We may find all kinds of jobs in supporting this technology,
but we can't take responsibility for and leadership over technology we
simply consume.
One way we can promote research in humanities computing and maintain our
autonomy is to embrace open source development. Many humanities
computing projects already rely on software such as Linux, the Apache
web server, MySQL, and Perl. These resources are freely available, not
only in an economic sense (it costs nothing to download) but in a
democratic sense: anyone can review the source code, modify it to suit
their needs, and distribute it as they see fit (provided you do not
attempt to restrict others' access to the original code). See
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html for one of Richard Stallman's
manifestos. The open-source software community fosters practices of and
dispositions toward intellectual labor that resemble in many ways those
of the academy. Open source developers share code in a common effort to
build better programs. Their motivation for research stems from their
own intiative, and their compensation is the recognition of their
peers. And the best thing about open source software is that it is
usually as good as, if not better, than closed source software. If end
users encounter problems with open source software, they can send
questions or comments to developers who respond immediately.
What I find compelling about the open source movement is that it
promotes research without pressure from outside and it fosters a
community of scholars who work together on their own accord. The
objectives of the open source community come from within the community,
not from a marketing division or an administrator. And it offers a
model for scholarship that can blend traditional humanities research
with information technology. The TEI has demonstrated that humanists
can determine for themselves how texts should be prepared for
computer-assisted analysis. What we need now is open source development
of tools that give scholars control over how they use computers to
analyze electronic media. This form of research does not require
extensive resources: open source tools are freely available on the net,
and researchers can work from anywhere since collaboration takes place
in over the Internet. What is required is time, energy, and a
willingness to learn technologies such as programming languages. You do
not have to be a hardcore programmer: it's amazing what you can do with
an Apache server and Perl. This kind of research may not be for
everyone, but as a community of scholars we should encourage open source
development if we want to decide for ourselves what tools and media we
will use and how.
mw
-- Mark B. Wolff Modern and Classical Languages Center for Learning and Teaching with Technology Hartwick College Oneonta, NY 13820 (607) 431-4615http://users.hartwick.edu/wolffm0/
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 06:59:04 +0100 From: "Chris McMahon" <pharmakeus@hotmail.com> Subject: Re: 14.0187 machines & pride, cyberspace
Dear Dr Lachance,
Perhaps it would be best if it could stay that way -
>There is not one diaster but many.
No great global technodisaster (like Y2K was supposed to be?), but just many little "disasters". Chernobyl was a little local disaster? So was the Kursk? I don't mean to beat up on the Russians here. Anyway, modularity might be a good design feature if we intend to stave off global disasters (the globalization of capitalism is already making global disasters, by the way) but each module would have to be somehow heterogenous? It is the heterogeneity of the humanities man or woman that enables her or him to salvage the situation? Even though Y2K did not happen, it is an interesting model for a global disaster based on modular homogeneity. Now can IT be both global (reaping those benefits)and hetergeneous (preventing the disaster)? I'm wondering? On the model of globalized capital, I suspect not?
> Just as a Turing machine's configuration can be interpreted as states >of being or as instructions, a story can be considered an apparatus >processing descriptions and questions, figures and sequences. > >and > > A story is at once product and apparatus of production. It is an >autopoetic structure. It will take a picture, a question, a description, >an imperative and transform either it, itself, or both. A story is a >machine that learns.
So intrigued by these wonderful ideas, from where I sit in Australia, I visited your website [a while ago and far away (or only a click)] and found so much to cogitate upon.
:) Chris ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
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