Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 484.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 10:38:06 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: times of gatherings and celebrations
Dear colleagues,
Tonight is the longest of the year, today the shortest. Perhaps because I
am still relatively new to this country, at this latitude, and live in a
part of an old city whose buildings were built from bricks dark with age,
I'm more than a little apt for appreciation of the gloom that characterizes
winter here. Every one of these last 7 years in London winter has surprised
me, who was schooled to expect bitter bright cold days and nights. I am
speaking of a physical gloom, not a psychological one, though the one could
become the other very easily, given less happy circumstances. This year is
very special for me, in that I am spending it entirely by writing, with the
occasional bout of reading to support gaps in the fortifications. Hence my
experience of gloom and the absurdly rapid return of night take a writerly
form. Yesterday, as I was sending off notice to Humanist of two relevant
Habilitationsschriften, I thought, that's it, I'll call what I am writing
now my Hibernationsschrift! Qualifications out of a long sleep for the long
sleep....
Yes, yes, I really should explain, for the benefit of those among the 1258
subscribers whose time in Humanist does not include a previous occasion
like this one. Every year since 1987, with a 5-year hiatus, I've sent out
an all-inclusive solstitial greeting of good cheer to everyone, in which
self-indulgently I allow myself to conform mentally to the cultural
stereotype of jolly generosity with which I was raised, the scholar Santa,
as it were. Christmas is in 3 days, Kwanza the day after, the solstice
(a.k.a. Yule) and Tohji-taisai today, Chanukah already in progress, Bodhi
Day past by a couple of weeks -- and others important to many, which I am
too ignorant to know of. A dark time in which we celebrate the light. Like
the boy on the hill above Rio, in the movie Black Orpheus, at sunrise,
playing the old guitar he has just inherited, to make sure the sun will
come up? Something of that darkly informs the cooking, wrapping, gathering,
eating and raising of glasses, perhaps.
In this run-up to Christmas I have been thinking appropriately about the
social aspects of what we do, in particular meditating on the phrase "lone
scholar" (yes, as I sit alone in my study, writing). If my ear for
linguistic usage is working reliably, then what I hear when people use this
phrase tends toward something like a denegration -- an implicit assignment
of the traditional mode of humanistic scholarship to "the dustbin of
history" (Trotsky to the Menscheviks at the Second All-Russian Congress of
the Soviets, 25 October 1917). I have no problem whatever with
collaboration -- a fine thing, in my own experience one of the best. What
bothers me, rather, is the promotion of a model of practice without
understanding its relation to the native "epistemic culture" (Karin Knorr
Cetina's term). As Thomas Kuhn suggested many years ago in a strongly
autobiographical account of work in physics, history and philosophy, not
only the way people work but what they recognize as valid work and where
they think that it happens differ from one epistemic culture to another. In
the humanities the locus of work is more or less in the writing -- in
contrast, say, to physics or computer science, where the write-up tends to
report on the work, not be it. Indeed, unless the work were external to the
writing, invested in manipulation of objects, it would seem difficult to
imagine the kind of authorship-by-committee that Peter Galison describes in
"The Collective Author" (Scientific Authorship, ed. Biagioli and Galison,
Routledge 2003, pp. 332ff).
My point here is not merely that in the epistemic culture(s) of the
humanities, the solitary nature of much of the work we do is integral to
the kind of work it is. At the same time, this work is intensely social.
One realizes the social aspect whenever questions of audience arise: how
important it is to understand whom one is addressing, what they know, how
they need and expect to be addressed -- how important it is actually *to
communicate*. (This is an especially challenging matter for an
intrinsically interdisciplinary field such as ours.) We see the social
nature of our work in citations to other scholarship, less obviously but no
less powerfully in the ideas we inherit, chunks of code we borrow or depend
on and so forth. It is attested profoundly in the acknowledgements given in
the leading footnotes to papers and in that special section of books where
authors detail their indebtedness. In my own experience, the question of
audience has been central, peer-review both demanding and very positive, in
all but one or two cases leaving me with strong gratitude to my reviewers.
Recently, for example, I submitted a paper that ventured deep into
territory not my own. One of the reviewers turned out clearly to be a
leading authority in the field (the authority was obvious in the writing),
who responded in a detailed and lengthy critique from which I learned a
great deal. There was, I suspect, a full day's worth of work or more in
that review. Where else, how else could one get such devoted and
intelligent attention?
Perhaps the most intensely social experience of scholarship, however, comes
in the writing of a book, which in my case is far closer to the speaking of
a multitude to itself than to a lone voice addressing a vast crowd. The
experience is almost orchestral and certainly one of a vast
socio-intellectual resonance. It is one of participation in a long, slowly
unfolding conversation.
Then there's Humanist and its kind, to which in the last 17-18 years
so-called lone scholars have flocked in droves. Some here will remember
when we were told that computers would lead to the massive isolation of
individuals from each other, everyone in front of a screen, no one
face-to-face. Then people began to wonder why computer labs were so popular
among those who had their own machines. Now people like Terry Winograd are
telling us not only that computers are about communicating rather than
alphanumeric crunching but that the metaphor of the "interface" (that which
is between a person and his or her machine) is all wrong, that it should be
replaced by another, the "habitat" ("From Computing Machinery to
Interaction Design", in Peter Denning and Robert Metcalfe, eds., Beyond
Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing, Springer-Verlag, 1997,
149-162, online at http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/acm97.html). I suppose
one could argue in the manner of Geoffrey Nunberg that our party-animal
nature, long constricted by professional modes of communication, is now
allowed its rampant freedom -- that although we were highly social lone
scholars before, now we are even more so.
And perhaps that's a good place to stop so that preparations for the more
local parties may proceed unfettered by this global chit-chat. The sun is
now midway in its travels across the rooftops opposite me, and I am still
writing. Certain foodstuffs need to be procured before the sky is dark
again, and there are large chunks of someone else's book to read and
comment on. So I'm off, with heartiest possible greetings and the very best
wishes to everyone for a fine social time of it.
Yours,
WM
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
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