Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 358.
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: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 10:44:55 +0100
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: New Media & Old Methods
Geoffrey,
Some stray thoughts about your recent posting on the place of
multimedia in humanities computing...
Does the field of "humanities computing" have always at least two sets of
methods: one on the computing side and one on the humanities side?
The didactic niche is one that in the North American academy has often
been occupied by modern language departments offering service courses for
language acquistion. Has anyone written a history of the language lab and
its contribution to humanties computing?
The separation between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts may be a
very old occidental phenomenon influencing the biais for or against
multimedia (iconoclastic debates rage on...)
It is tempting to compare the uptake of multimedia in humanities computing
to its uptake in in the scholarship of archeology, art history,
musicology, theatre and film studies, museum studies, and other such
disciplines. And map this against the very material conditions of the
infrastructures (i.e. the availibilty of wired classrooms and labs as well
as digital collections and online teaching & research resources).
Finally, even if a superb infrastructure exists, it is no mean feat to
attract and retain qualified people with the proper cross-disciplinary
credentials.
You ask, "Are we willing to exile the arts (which have
a different relationship to method called technique) from the humanities
in order to have a tidy "human science" paradigm?
The metaphor of exile seems to assume that the arts were "in" at some
point in time. I would like to read more on Humanist about how people
construe a possible difference between "method" and "technique". I do
recall some references on Humanist to Feyerabend by Willard
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v14/0074.html
Is this not all (institutional struggles aside) about the place of
"experimentation" in the production of knowledge. The compositional
exercises of imitation and translation (be it with reference to verbal,
musical or pictorial modes or be it with cross-modal reference) were very
much part of the Humanist culture that formed the cultural matrix out of
which "science" developed.
Back to primitives:
if experimentation is the methodology,
does the method require as primitives "states" and "durations"?
I ask this because I am beginning to wonder if the challenge of new media
(both multimedia and distributed objects in networked environments) is not
to rethink the ancillary mathematics that accompany humanities computing.
Is the field shifting or expanding from a concern with the sample space of
statistics to the phase space of topology? And I know "concern" is not
quite the correct word here. What I am attempting to describe is a tension
between the desire to describe all possibilities and the desire to trace
paths to local ontologies.... which of course opens an avenue to the
constellation of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence and the
debates over cultural relativism.
And it just might be the dillettante and the amateur that act as the
"translators" between disciplines enabling those pleasant bumps that A.
Koestler describes in _The Act of Creation_. Interesting how the metaphor
of "exile" induces the return of the prodigal.
more mathematics for both the humanities and the arts !!! :)
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
Member of the Evelyn Letters Project
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~dchamber/evelyn/evtoc.htm
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