Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 282.
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: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 09:17:45 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: primitives
My question about primitives was based on two convictions: (1) that
methodologically computing humanists across the disciplines occupy a common
ground, and (2) that the development of computing is increasingly toward
putting the ability to make things into the hands of ordinary users. It
seems to me that these two convictions are both involved in the many
tool-building enterprises to which references have so far been made.
The common ground seems not to be visible to everyone; I'd suppose that in
order to see it an interdisciplinary vantage point is required. In my
experience those who look on applied computing activity solely from within
a single discipline have great difficulty; to them methodology is so
subservient to the artefacts over which their disciplines have (or claim)
dominion that it ceases to have meaning otherwise. Admittedly, the
geography of our common ground is still not all that well defined, and much
remains to be done in the transfer of constructive ability to the "end
user". But are these not genuine problems for our research agenda?
Wilhelm Ott (by example in Humanist 14.262) and John Bradley (14.272) are
surely right, that in Bradley's words, "Any tool meant to support
activities as diverse as those that turn up in humanities text-based
computing cannot possibly be trivial to learn or use", but I don't think
that trivialising is necessarily involved in identifying and simplifying
basic operations, in making them (as we say) more accessible to scholars
than they currently are. I'd think that the objective of our
system-building isn't to remove the need for intellectual labour, rather
that component of scholarly work which is mechanically definable, and
therefore trivial (in the mathematician's sense).
Ian Lancashire suggests that "one of the unforeseen effects of relying on
professional programmers to create big pieces of software like TACT and
Wordcruncher [might be] to encourage scholars in the humanities to believe
that they can get along without being able to write small programs or adapt
ones created by other people" (14.277). Yes, indeed. Our colleagues
sometimes do approach computing with the expectation that everything may be
accomplished at the touch of a button. It seems to me, however, that we're
not in disagreement fundamentally, rather arguing about the level of
granularity at which we humanists work with computers. Does this
necessarily and forever need to be at the level of, say, Snobol or Pascal
or perl or Java? Once, I recall, it was at the level of assembler language;
I clearly remember arguments to the effect that unless you understood what
commands like "shift left accumulator" did you could not grasp the essence
of computing....
So also is Wendell Piez surely right, that "Every lens comes with its
blindness, and as we design these capabilities into systems, by deciding
what we want to look at, we will also be deciding what we don't care to
see.... [G]reat works of literature will continue to evade whatever
structures we impose on them, just as they always have...." (14.277). I'd
argue that the point of what we do is to raise better questions than the
ones we have, only incidentally to come up with (tentative, temporary)
answers, and that those of us who use computers in scholarship raise such
questions by showing what can be known computationally -- therefore what we
cannot know, or know how we know, now.
In an online document he recommended to our attention, Wilhelm Ott
describes the conclusion he reached about 30 years ago after work on some
major textual projects: that "the next step in supporting projects was to
no longer rely on programming in FORTRAN or other 'high level' languages,
but to provide a toolbox consisting of programs, each covering one 'basic
operation' required for processing textual data. The function of each
program is controlled by user-supplied parameters; the programs themselves
may be combined in a variety of ways, thereby allowing the user to
accomplish tasks of the most diversified kind. It was in 1978 when these
programs got the name TUSTEP"
(http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/zdv/tustep/tdv_eng.html#b). The TUSTEP toolbox
defines these basic operations: editing, comparing, processing text,
preparing indexes, presorting, sorting, generating indexes and
concordances, generating listings, typesetting (with some file-handling and
job-control fuctions as well). Much more recently, John Unsworth in a talk
given at King's College London (forthcoming in print from the Office of
Humanities Communication; online at
<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html>)
identified 7 scholarly primitives also based on close interdisciplinary
observation and project work -- discovering, annotating, comparing,
referring, sampling, illustrating and representing -- as the basis for a
tool-building enterprise. He illustrated these primitives with work that
has been going on for some time at IATH.
Contemplating Ott's TUSTEP and Unsworth's thoughts about primitives, I
wonder if what we're seeing here is two parts of a much larger design,
proceeding from universality to specificity. In broad terms, could it be
said that a "methodological macro" like Unsworth's "discovering" or
"annotating" comprise "methodological primitives" like "consult lexicon",
"search WWW" "recognise image patterns", each of which in turn comprises
"mechanical primitives" and so forth?
I see us facing a real-world problem that in turn gives us a very
challenging research agenda. This problem continues to be the one Wilhelm
Ott, Susan Hockey and others faced many years ago, how best collegially to
support research in the humanities with computers, or in other words, how
to get more of our non-technically inclined colleagues intellectually
involved in applied computing -- if for no other reason than the creative
imaginations they will bring into the increasingly complex equation. Do we
tell them to learn C++ or whatever, or do we work with them to define a
better research pidgin? As a search of the Web shows, talk about
"primitives" is common parlance among cognitive scientists and philosophers
who (like Jerry Fodor) think about how we think and do intellectual work,
and among the system builders who design and make the software prototypes.
Modelling, which is what one does with primitives, is a very active topic
-- see the Model-Based Reasoning Conference advertised in Humanist 14.269.
Much going on for us to tap into, as well as much that has gone on which we
need to take account of.
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities /
King's College London / Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
voice: +44 (0)20 7848-2784 / fax: +44 (0)20 7848-2980 /
ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/
maui gratias agere
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