Convergent games on common ground Humanities computing, computer science and cultural artefacts

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Convergent games on common ground? Humanities
computing, computer science and cultural artefacts

• Dr Willard McCarty
• Reader in Humanities Computing
• Kings College London
• 25 May 2006

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The larger project
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History of conjectures proposals

• 1972--. Early writings by Robert Oakman (South
  Carolina) and Christian Koch (Oberlin),
  speculating on a relationship and noting
  potential writings and work by Manfred Thaller
  (Cologne) on humanities computer science
  writings by Tito Orlandi (Rome), Jean-Claude
  Gardin (Paris), Nancy Ide (Vassar) and others.
• 1990. Interpretation in the Humanities
  Perspectives from Artificial Intelligence, ed.
  Richard Ennals and Jean-Claude Gardin (British
  Library).
• 1992. Report of the US National Research Council,
  Computing the Future, 2 mentions of the
  humanities.
• 1997-8. Rountable Meeting to explore the
  complexities of cross-disciplinary cooperation,
  Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, US
  National Research Council proceedings published
  as Computing and the Humanities Summary of a
  Roundtable Meeting (American Council of Learned
  Societies).
• 1999. Report of the Advanced Computing in the
  Humanities (ACOHUM) project, Computing in
  Humanities Education A European Perspective
  (Bergen, Norway).
• 2003. Building Blocks Workshop, US National
  Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage.
• 2003. Transforming Disciplines Computer Science
  and the Humanities conference (The National
  Academies, Rice and Princeton).
• 2003. Report of the Committee on Information
  Technology Creativity, US National Research
  Council. Beyond Productivity (47 mentions of the
  humanities).
• 2005. Computer science in McCarty, Humanities
  Computing (Palgrave).
• 2006. Toward Computational Models of Literary
  Analysis workshop, Languages Resources and
  Evaluation conference (Genova).
• 2006. US Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for
  the Humanities and Social Sciences, American
  Council of Learned Societies, 5 mentions of CS.
• 2006. Breadth of Text A Joint Computer Science
  and Humanities Computing Conference. Fifth
  Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis (CaSTA 2006,
  New Brunswick).

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The promises of e-Science

• Future meaning of e-Science large scale science
  that will increasingly be carried out through
  distributed global collaborations enabled by the
  Internet which will require access to very
  large data collections, very large scale
  computing resources and high performance
  visualisation back to the individual user
  scientists (www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience). The
  practical implications for collaborative
  interaction remain untested. A funding concept
  or an administrative idea in a political
  context?
• Present meaning essentially the same as its
  principal technology, the Access Grid, a system
  which coordinates resources that are not subject
  to centralized control using standard, open,
  general-purpose protocols and interfaces to
  deliver nontrivial quantities of service (Foster
  2002). The implication is a highly coordinated,
  research-intensive, computationally high-end
  version of the Internet.
• Both present and future meanings of e-Science
  leave the questions considered here untouched.

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The promises of the Semantic Web

• A research programme based on the reification of
  a hope that we can find what we want or that
  what we will want will find us
• An uncertain triplet vexed by impossibilities
  and restrictions (Shipman and Marshall 2003).
  
• Everything to every person.

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Cyberinfrastructure report concludes

• Scholars in the humanities social sciences
  cannot depend on CS to build the needed tools
• Problems in CS that impinge directly on these
  fields should be given priority
• Better funding for digital humanities will
  benefit both the humanities and CS
• Efforts should be made to broaden access to
  high-end computing
• The needs of humanists and scientists converge in
  the emerging cyberinfrastructure.

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CaSTA 2006

• Question to be addressed by members of the
  Humanities Computing Science? panel at the
  conclusion of this conferenceWhat are your
  perceptions of how the two research areas
  computer science and humanities computing can
  inform each other?

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Actual overlapping activities

• Text-encoding. The Text Encoding Initiative
  (www.tei-c.org) ? large-scale humanities
  text-encoding projects development of XML
• Text-analysis. The Text Analysis Portal for
  Research project (TAPoR, www.tapor.ca) tools for
  humanists, real-world computing challenges for
  computer scientists
• Modelling. The Empirical Modelling Group
  (Warwick, www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/modelling/).
• Narratology. Story Generator Algorithms project
  (Hamburg, www1.uni-hamburg.de/story-generators//in
  dex_en.html), a mutual mapping of narratological
  and Artificial Intelligence approach onto each
  other.
• Digital library research. Some groups projects
  (e.g., Cornell Texas AM Fedora,
  www.fedora.info)
• Semantic Web research (as above)
• Disciplinary fusions/engulfments. Humanities
  Computer Science (Historisch- Kulturwissenschaftli
  che Informationsverarbeitung, Cologne,
  www.hki.uni-koeln.de/) Library information
  science at some places, e.g. University College
  London (www.slais.ucl.ac.uk) Illinois
  Urbana-Champaign (www.lis.uiuc.edu/)
• Institution-specific collaborative research
  units. IATH, Virginia (www.iath.virginia.edu/)
  Digital Atheneum Project (Kentucky,
  beowulf.engl.uky.edu/eft/digitalatheneum/) a
  few other places
• Small-scale cross-disciplinary raiding parties,
  esp from CS into the humanities for worthy
  problems
• Mind-modelling. Philosophy of mind (Dennett,
  Fodor et al), cognitive science and AI.

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Trajectory

• ?
• Whats happening is under-theorized!

So what? Why not just get on with the work?
Behaviour known to be characteristic can be
understood, anticipated, responded to
intelligently though it is never more than an
historical context for an indeterminate future.
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So, the basic theoretical questions

• What is, or might be, or is becoming, the
  relationship between the humanities and the
  sciences?
• What kind of a science is computer science? What
  is its trajectory?
• What are the emergent questions of humanities
  computing?

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Natural sciences
humanities
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Basic prior questions

• Sciences vs humanities?
• What kind of a science is computer science? What
  is its trajectory?
• What are the emergent questions of humanities
  computing?

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1. Sciences vs humanities

• Aristotle The sciences concern that which is
  always or for the most part (Met 1027a20-7) the
  humanities concern what is always happening, in
  poetry, or what has happened, in history
  (Poetics 1451a).
• Wilhelm Windelband Distinguish the nomothetic or
  law-seeking sciences from the idiographic or
  particularizing humanities for which his
  model is history (1894).
• Ernst Nagel the sciences seek to establish
  abstract general laws for indefinitely repeatable
  events and processes while the humanities aim
  to understand the unique and nonrecurrent
  (1961 547).

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1. Sciences vs humanities

• Heinrich Rickert Empirical reality becomes
  nature when we view it with respect to the
  universal it becomes history when we view it
  with respect to the particular and the
  individual (1913).
• Hans-Georg Gadamer Historical research does not
  endeavor to grasp the concrete phenomenon as an
  instance of a universal rule Its ideal is rather
  to understand the phenomenon itself in its unique
  and historical concreteness. However much
  experiential universals are involved, the aim is
  not to confirm and extend these universalized
  experiences in order to obtain knowledge of a law
  how men, peoples, states evolve but to
  understand how this man, this people or this
  state is what it has become or, more generally,
  how it happened that it is so. (2000/1960 4f)

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1. Sciences vs humanities

• An example from psychologythe problem of
  human personality concerns me deeplythe problem
  of Bills personality concerns me
  deeply Allport 1962 405

nomothetic
idiographic
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1. Sciences vs humanities

• Northrop Frye Science begins with the world we
  have to live in, accepting its data and trying to
  explain its laws. From there, it moves towards
  the imagination it becomes a mental construct, a
  model of a possible way of interpreting
  experience. Art, on the other hand, begins with
  the world we construct, not with the world we
  see. It starts with the imagination, and then
  works towards ordinary experience that is, it
  tries to make itself as convincing and
  recognizable as it can. (1963 6)
• Carlo Ginzburg The tendency to obliterate the
  individual traits of an object is directly
  proportional to the emotional distance of the
  observer. (1989/1986 12)

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1. Sciences vs humanities
mathematics
poetics
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Basic prior questions

• What is, or might be, or is becoming, the
  relationship between the humanities and the
  sciences?
• Computer science?
• What are the emergent questions of humanities
  computing?

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2. Computer science? Sources of confusion

• Problematic status of the word science in
  English in popular usage, chiefly an honourific
  term (Searle 1991/1984 11)
• Reduction of the plural and highly diverse
  sciences to the singular abstraction science,
  parallel to the reduction of scientific methods
  to the now discredited unitary Scientific
  Method (Galison 2004 Hacking 1983)
• Failure to note that most if not all disciplinary
  terminology, including theory and experiment,
  is dependent on the context of disciplinary
  practice for its meaning that a disciplines
  terms comprise the tropes and imageries by
  which it explains what it does (Geertz
  2000/1983)
• Failure to ask the historical question In
  specific cases what has it meant to make the
  claim that a field is a science? What have been
  the effects on these fields? (Mahoney 2002).

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2. Computer science? Computer sciences!

• Computation (i.e. the theory) may be singular,
  but computing (i.e. what is done with computers)
  is plural both in theory and in practice.
• The disciplinary term computer science implies
  unity, but in practice we find an amalgam of
  mathematical theory, engineering practice, and
  craft skill (Mahoney 1997) corresponding to the
  computer itself as an amalgam of technological
  device and mathematical concept (Mahoney 1988).
• Hence many possible conceptions, many stories of
  what it is and many possible relationships with
  other fields and practices e.g., mathematics,
  physics and engineering the social sciences the
  humanities the marketplace.

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2. Computer science? The dominant story

• Insofar as CS is scientific in the nomothetic
  sense, it does not so much seek to describe
  regularities as to implement and manifest them.
• Hence the dominant conception, most succinctly
  articulated by Peter Denning The fundamental
  question underlying all of computer science is
  what can be automated? (1985 16).
• In this sense, CS looks out on the world from the
  lenses of computational theory (mathematical
  description) and engineering practice
  (implementation).
• That which does not fit is essentially the
  residue of a problem-space, to be dealt with,
  tidied away or ignored as can be.

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Basic prior questions

• What is, or might be, or is becoming, the
  relationship between the humanities and the
  sciences?
• What kind of a science is computer science? What
  is its trajectory?
• Humanities computing?

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3. Humanities computing? The humanities

• The humanities a loose bundle of disciplines
  concerned with the study of cultural artefacts
  and productions.
• Their common aim not to solve problems but to
  make them worse (Fowler 1999 442) to turn the
  most important questions we have into better
  questions.
• Denn das Fragen ist die Frömmigkeit des Denkens,
  For questioning is the piety of thought
  (Heidegger 1977/1955 35)

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3. Humanities computing? A choice

• Build knowledge jukeboxes / data vending
  machines that reduce the scholar to a mere user.
• OR
• Build modelling devices that allow the scholar,
  as end-maker, to probe the question of method
  how we know what we know and to imagine what
  we dont know (McGann 2001 101-3).

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3. Humanities computing?

• If the humanities are for generating ever better
  questions, then a computing of the humanities
  must focus precisely on the problem-space
  residue.
• For the humanities this residue is potentially
  the hem of a quantum garment (McGann 2004 201)
  the seemingly insignificant detail that
  transforms our understanding of the whole.

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3. Humanities computing an image
Anna Chromy, Pieta, Salzburg Cathedral
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3. Humanities computing a theology
Meister Eckhart, Beati pauperes spiritu German
text from Meister Eckhart. Die deutschen und
lateinischen Werke, ed Josef Quint (1971) 48
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3. Humanities computing a philosophy
How can the working of the mind lead the mind
itself to problems?... How can the mind, by
methodical research, furnish itself with
difficult problems to solve?This happens
whenever a definite method meets its own
limit. Weil 1978 116
Philosophy constitutes less a doctrine of
judgment than a science of its limits....
Summoned before the Law, wisdom can no better
represent itself than in the step by which it
moves away from it Heller-Roazen 2006 442
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3. Humanities computing a practice
See the book! ?
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Conclusion the humanities, computing the
sciences
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(No Transcript)
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What must happen / is happening?

• Shift in the relevant areas of CS from toy
  problems, with a strict focus on what can be
  automated, to the question of how automatic
  processing can be integrated with its human
  correlative.
• Shift in humanities computing to recognize that
  fundamental data and processing models need to be
  rethought redesigned from a scholarly
  perspective.

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Bibliography

• McCarty, Willard. 2005. Humanities Computing.
  Basingstoke Palgrave.
• Items not in the above
• Gordon W Allport, The general and the unique in
  psychological science. Journal of Personality 30
  (1962) 405-22.
• Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the
  Humanities and Social Sciences, Draft Report.
  2005. New York American Council of Learned
  Societies. www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber_
  report.htm
• Foster, Ian. 2002. What is the Grid? A Three
  Point Checklist. Argonne National Laboratory,
  www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/foster/Articles/WhatIsTheGrid
  .pdf.
• Heller-Roazen, Daniel. 2006. Philosophy before
  the Law Averroëss Decisive Treatise. Critical
  Inquiry 32 442.
• Mahoney, Michael S. 1988. The History of
  Computing in the History of Technology. Annals
  of the History of Computing 10 113-25.
• Nagel, Ernst. 1961. The Structure of Science
  Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation.
  London Routledge Kegan Paul.
• Rickert, Heinrich. 1913/1896. Die Grenzen der
  naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung. 2nd edn.
  Tübingen.
• Windelband, Wilhelm. 1894. Geschichte und
  Naturwissenschaft. Rede zum Antritt des Rektorats
  der Kaiser-Willheims-Universität Straßburg, 1 Mai
  1894. Republished as Rectoral Address,
  Strasbourg, 1894. Trans. Guy Oakes. Classics in
  the Philosophy of History. History and Theory
  19.2 (1980) 169-85.See also Oakes, Guy. 1980.
  History and Natural Science. History and Theory
  19.2 (1980) 165-8.