Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 587.
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, 11 Jan 2001 07:49:31 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: cognitive effects of formatting?
I would be most grateful for a pointer to what Humanists consider the best
treatment of the relationship between how data is presented and how we
think about those data -- i.e. the cognitive, intellectual consequences of
formatting. Perhaps the most obvious example is the KWIC concordance, which
by centering the target word draws the user's attention to its linguistic
environment -- in a way that presentation by phrase or other literary or
linguistic unit in the hand-built concordance does not. We tend, I think,
to dismiss such apparently trivial matters as sorting or reformatting,
paying attention rather to complicated transformations of data, esp those
involving substantial amounts of "computation". I suspect,
however, that one could make a powerful argument to the effect that in the
humanities the profound changes attributable to computing follow from some
of the simplest causes, such as the ability to sort a list of words or
retrieve different bits of the data in a different order. (I mean here
*conceptually simple* causes; sorting, for example, can require very
sophisticated, complex programming.)
Many thanks.
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Senior Lecturer /
Centre for Computing in the Humanities / King's College London /
Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
+44 (0)20 7848-2784 / ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/
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