Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 60.
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: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (48)
Subject: educating the imagination
[2] From: "Norman D. Hinton" <hinton@springnet1.com> (17)
Subject: Re: 15.056 obstacles &c to humanities computing
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Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 07:06:59 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: educating the imagination
I'd say that the Norman Hinton's English PhD who does what he or she needs
to do or is curious about, ignoring the folks who are trying to define
what's important, is exactly right -- as long as that person has what
Northrop Frye called an "educated imagination". I suppose this is what
Fotis Jannidis is saying too.
My first experience teaching English literature taught me that the students
did not know how to read literature, or anything really beyond the level of
newspapers and magazines. They had no idea what to do mentally with love
sonnets other than to talk about how this or that image reminded them of
what happened last summer. (The author at the time was John Donne :-) The
conventional way of handling this is, I suppose, to force the students to
read lots of the stuff, rewarding certain kinds of responses, discouraging
others. That approach eventually worked on me. My experience suggests now
that my imagination couldn't begin to function until I understood how to
read the stuff, i.e. until I internalised all the simplistic rules about
literary conventions, genres, the theories floating about at the time etc.,
along with a huge amount of literature. That last bit proved exceedingly
important -- literature by the dump-truck load, read non-stop without time
for any reflection at all, in preparation for my Toronto PhD qualifying exams.
Sometimes I get rather discouraged about PhD training now -- not what my
colleagues do, really; mostly they seem very good scholars and teachers,
doing what they do with the best of intentions. But (if I may resort to a
notoriously vague term) the academic cultures I know appear tacitly to be
telling the newly-minted ones that unless they learn to walk the walk and
talk the talk they have no chance of ever getting paid to do what
presumably they undertook the long years of training to do. Curiosity
hasn't a chance, is forgotten. The goal appears so often to be to establish
the right profile; the work (which I think is the point) simply isn't
mentioned.
We *certainly* don't want that sort of thing for humanities computing, if
we can avoid it, and I'd guess that Norman's anger may be due to such
perversions. But at the same time, we cannot have newly minted computing
humanists thinking that the social sciences are all bunk, or that literary
criticism is all about reading stuff "in" to literature, or that
artificially understanding 90% or even 99.99% of text is good enough --
especially that understanding can be quantified at all in that way; we
cannot have them ignorant of history or philosophy etc. They have to have
some idea of languages other than their native one. And so forth and so on.
Otherwise their imaginations won't have the basic stuff with which to be
curious. They won't be able to *desire* to do scholarship with a ferocity
of intelligence which will not be stopped by anything or anyone.
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/
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 07:07:34 +0100
From: "Norman D. Hinton" <hinton@springnet1.com>
Subject: Re: 15.056 obstacles &c to humanities computing
The question and answer relevant to what I said about the doctorate in
English is not "do you know who Shakespeare is?", but "Did you have a
Shakespeare course while studying for your doctorate?" In my case, the
answer is "no". Since I was not specializing in the Renaissance, there
was no reason for me to take one.
(Our requirements (University of Wisconsin, in the 1950's) were to take
a seminar in every field in which we did not take a comprehensive exam
-- and a seminar was not a comprehensive course, but a special topic
that interested the teacher.. I chose to write a doctoral exam on
Shakespeare rather than take any coursework.[ p.s. I got the highest
grade of the 24 candidates])
In the 1960's the U.S. Government began talking about possible
nationwide standards for the Ph.D. in English. This was so vigorously
opposed by the graduate departments of the country that the plan was
withdrawn.
Again, I feel the same way about "humanities computing". Learn what you
need and let the rest go hang. And don't let anyone tell you what it
is you need if you don't agree.
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