Literary enquiry & experimental method

transcript

Literary enquiry &

experimental

method

Professor Willard McCartyKing’s College Londonstaff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/

Crossing Boundaries, Università di Bari, Italia,28/4/2008

No amount of refinement or subtlety within the world of mechanism can avail; once we are in that world, what we need is already gone. Thus, we must retreat to an earlier epistemological stage, before the assumptions that characterize mechanisms have been made.

Robert Rosen, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the

Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (1991): xvi

Rather than think of the computer as a kind of brain, think of it as a kind of book…. a machine for processing a variety of symbolic forms organized in looping autopoietic structures….

Jerome McGann, “Visible language, Interface, IVANHOE”, in The

Scholar’s Art: Literary Studies in a Managed World (2006): 15.

1.The problem

2.Lessons of history, 1949-1989

3. The matchmaker’s tasks

4. What the tools say

5. Turning to confront the context

6. Bridging discourse

7. An improvisational companion to criticism?

Herbert Simon, untitled lecture notes, Operations Research Society of America meeting, 14 November 1957

Times Literary Supplement, 27 April 1962

Not a “menial tool” but a telescope of the mind that may change our outlook.

Globe and Mail, 16 November 1965

Scientific American, May 2001

www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3244/

www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9547

Computers and the Humanities 1 (1966: 3-6)

Next step is to be “truly imaginative”

Scholars’ primary involvement is with the creative act

Reorganization of thinking for the new age

10Computers and the Humanities 11 (1978): 211-15

the problem is our limited conceptual framework and the unexamined concept of text

Our range of vision has not been enlarged

1.The problem

Multa pinxit, hic Brugelius, quae pingi non possunt.... In omnibus eius operibus intelligitur plus semper quam pingitur.He painted many things, this Bruegel, that cannot be painted…. In all of his works, more is to be understood than is painted.

Abraham Ortelius, Album Amicorum (1574-98)

13Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece (26. Auflage)

Computers and the Humanities 11 (1978): 211-15

In Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Schreibman, Siemens and Unsworth (Blackwell’s, 2004)

1.The problem

Keyword-in-context concordancer

Literary concepts & their interrelations expressed in software

Relational database diagram

A typical ontology diagram

Commentary in an annotation tool

Traces of stylistic features from a statistical analyzer

On-screen output from a keyword-in-context concordancer

Phrasal concordance to the Bible, 16C

9C glossed ms of Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (Leiden 48)

Annotated scholarly article using Pliny

Relational database diagram of a literary trope

Tree of Knowledge, from Ramon Llull, Arbor Scientiae (late 13C)

1.The problem

modelling of

modelling for

Modelling relations

Natural system/ artefact

Formal/ abstract system

internal logic

Based on Rosen 2000: 159 and Geertz 1993/1973: 93.

internal logic

Improvisational

modelling

Formal/ abstract system

internal logic ?Various

temporary “construals”

1.The problem

Computational analogy of mind:

human brain cells grown in tissue culture on a Motorola 68000 chip

Judy Trogadis, Toronto Western Hospital, 1985; cf. John K. Stevens, “Reverse Engineering the Brain”, Byte (April 1985): 286-99.

1.The problem

IVANHOEPossible Ivanhoes

tt’s

Various players

Vere, inquam, magistrum mirabilem mihi dedisti, qui a me factus me doceat, meque docens ipse nihil sapiat. Imo propter patientiam et obedientiam sui eum maxime amplector; cantabit enim mihi quando voluero, et numquam de mei sensus tarditate commotus verberibus vel iniuriis cruciabit.

?Indeed, I say, you gave me a wonderful master, who made by me teaches me, and teaching me himself knows nothing. Rather I embrace him in submission and obedience; truly he will play to me when I wish, and never will he torment, with floggings or blows, the thoughts that move slowly from me.

Literary enquiry & experimental method

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