Is Willard McCarty's talk really on Thursday the 11th? I hope so, as it
will keep it from interfering with e-summit activities.
Sorry to say, even with the reschedule of Aarseth's talk, I will be unable
to attend owing to Film Festival obligations.
Best,
Johanna Drucker
At 12:09 PM 10/15/99 -0400, you wrote:
>
>Next week, the Humanities Computing Seminar meet from 2 to 4 o'clock in
>order to avoid a time conflict with David Blair's talk earlier in the day.
>Espen Aarseth will speak about "Creating a Field of Our Own." His paper is
>available from our seminar home page
>(http://www.iath.virginia.edu/hcs/papers.html). I'll be back in touch
>soon to let you know where the session with Espen will be held.
>
>Willard McCarty, who will visit us on November 11th, posted the following
>message to the Humanist list today. It speaks to the central question of
>our seminar.
>
> -- Bethany
>
>
>Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 07:55:06 +0100
>From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
>Subject: humanities computing and editing & al.
>
>Recently a colleague pointed out to me that in my attempts to think
>through what we call "humanities computing", computer-assisted projects
>that prepare editions, archives and other electronic resources did not
>seem to fit. I'm not an editor by trade, though my primary (traditional)
>scholarly focus for the last decade has been on preparation of a reference
>work, and this has involved me with many issues common to editing. So I
>feel qualified to reply, and I reply in public because I think the basic
>question is important.
>
>In my project I distinguish between two sorts of activity:
>
>(1) everything involved in preparing the reference work, including
>research on problems raised in its traditional scholarly field and those
>that occur in the course of using computational methods;
>
>(2) study of the consequences and implications of those computational
>methods.
>
>It seems to me that (1), however scholarly and consequential to the
>traditional field in which I work, does not constitute humanities
>computing per se, only (2) does. Now the two are of course so intimately
>intertwined and grown together that in fact they cannot be separated, but
>they can be distinguished.
>
>Let us say for the purposes of argument that I did (1) but not (2).
>Actually this happens all the time by scholars in traditional areas who
>either don't have the time to pursue (2) while they are doing (1) or don't
>think (2) important, or perhaps don't even notice it. Would, then, my
>project properly qualify as "humanities computing"? I think not -- it
>would only be one of the many that unselfconsciously use computing on a
>humanities project. (It would also have much, much less to contribute to
>its traditional field, but that's a whole issue in itself.)
>
>If we were to say that all projects qualify in which the computer plays a
>significant role, then we would have more difficulty finding research that
>did not qualify than research that did. But in so enlarging the domain of
>our practice, we would in effect be declaring that it had no intellectual
>integrity, no distinguishing point of view, no definition.
>
>Philosophers, for example, like to say that their field includes all
>thought, historians everything that has ever happened, biologists all
>living systems, linguists all language. Works well in promotional blurbs
>to attract students and does root each field solidly in human culture. But
>of course when you enroll in a programme in one of those fields you
>discover that only some aspects of thought, happenings, life, language are
>of interest and the ways of looking at them are sharply focused. Excluding
>most happenings from history neither denigrates those happenings (such as
>being in love, or finishing one's dissertation) nor kills history. The
>limitations thus imposed make the field able to put the excluded phenomena
>into meaningful context and so inform these phenomena.
>
>Comments?
>
>Yours,
>WM
>
>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
>voice: +44 (0)171 848 2784 fax: +44 (0)171 848 5081
><Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> <http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/>
>maui gratia
>
>
>
> Bethany Paige Nowviskie
> University of Virginia Department of English
> Design Editor/Senior Research Assistant, Rossetti Archive
> Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
>
>