19.579 VR scholarly editions

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19, No. 579.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 06:43:23 +0000
         From: lachance_at_origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
         Subject: CAD, VR and the tools of scholarly editions

Willard,

Your VR thought experiment persisently tugs...

Lucy Suchman in "Agencies in Technology Design: Feminist Reconfigurations"
describes the work of an engineer using the tools of computer assisted
design. I think what she describes is relevant to the VR edition thread
pursued a while ago on Humanist. It is a sociological way of describing an
historical agent at play with tools of the trade.

<quote>
While CAD might be held up as an exemplar of the abstract representation
of concrete things, for the practicing engineer the story is more complex.
Rather than stand in place of the specific locales - roadways, natural
features, built environments, people and politics - of a project, the CAD
system connects the experienced engineer sitting at her worktable to those
things, at the same time that they exceed the system's representational
capacities. The engineer knows the project through a multiplicity of
documents, discussions, extended excursions to the project site, embodied
labors and accountabilities, and the textual, graphical and symbolic
inscriptions of the interface are read in relation to these heterogeneous
forms of embodied knowing. Immersed in her work, the
CAD interface becomes for the engineer a simulacrum of the site, not in
the sense of a substitute for it, but rather of a place in which to work,
with its own specific materialities, constraints and possibilities. While
lacking any claims to embodiment, affect or sociality in its own right,
the CAD interface-in-use is, I would argue, a powerful site of expanded,
sociomaterial agency. It suggests a figure of technological agency not in
the form of machinic operations conducted independently of the human, but
in the form of a particular configuration, a specifically enacted site of
extended, heterogeneously constituted human/nonhuman capacities for
thought and action.
</quote>

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/sociology/papers/suchman-agenciestechnodesign.pdf

It is worth isolating and emphasising a key sentence: "The engineer knows
the project through a multiplicity of documents, discussions, extended
excursions to the project site, embodied labors and accountabilities, and
the textual, graphical and symbolic inscriptions of the interface are read
in relation to these heterogeneous forms of embodied knowing."

What is known comes from experience; what is read is related to the
experience. This leads me to ask if the satisfactory design of the tools
translates into the creation of a point through which accumulated
experience is brought to bear upon a set of materials --- this is a bit
different than the last question (i.e. are we seeking to cover more ground
in less time) I left suspended in the twist and ply of this thread. The
tool is less a vehicle and more a point of entry, port or junction.

-- 
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/jardin
~~~ to be surprised by machines: wistly and sometimes wistfully