DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2007
Volume 1 Number 1
Volume 1 Number 1
Philosophy and Digital Humanities: A review of Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing (London and NY: Palgrave, 2005)
Abstract
A review of Willard McCarty's Humanities Computing.
Humanities computing is still a fledgling discipline, in spite of its claim to a lineage now
decades old that descends from the estimable Father Busa and his assiduous labors
in the stony fields of concordance and corpus linguistics. The cultural authority of computing
has an older history yet, linked as it is to traditions of analytic thought and rational
calculus in the work of Descartes and Leibniz. Noble pilgrims of the
flock have wrestled hard in recent years to define humanities computing and dignify the
complex undertaking with a status beyond mere service. By taking on the challenge of framing
the intellectual project as an epistemological one, Willard McCarty raises issues germane to
the humanities in their current dialogue with digital technology. McCarty’s method is that of
the via negativa, a rigorous approach to the study of knowledge through
attention to ignorance, that pushes at assumptions to lay them bare. For McCarty that means we
should pay attention to our ways of knowing as much as to objects of knowledge. So if
knowledge is not an object, but a method, then humanities computing is a way of producing
knowledge, and McCarty asks how it works as an epistemological practice. To answer this
question, McCarty moves through a series of discussions meant to define and address the issues
he sees as central ones. What is the scholar’s task, particularly the task of commentary? What
is a discipline? How does analytic reason relate to humanistic inquiry? What may be automated?
And perhaps most basic of all, how are scholarly activities in the humanities to be understood
as interpretive acts in which modeling is fundamental? Focusing attention on the ways
computational techniques produce means and objects of study for humanists, he brings the
humanist’s skills to bear in creating historically-referenced, philosophical self-awareness in
his study.
This book sits very comfortably within the growing corpus of works in this field. More
specifically focused, pragmatic books like Susan Hockey’s
Electronic Texts in the Humanities and case-based studies, such as Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, edited by Kathryn Sutherland, have posed some of these arguments around
the edges of their central project of documenting and discussing research methods and
practices. The pieces in the Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John
Unsworth present a wide range of framing arguments within the individual pieces, some
blatantly speculative and theoretical, some waving aside philosophical issues and just getting
on with the job of introducing text encoding or the current impact on specific disciplines.
Among these publications, Jerome McGann’s
Radiant Textuality stands out for its particular breadth. Shot through with insights from the textual
critic’s experience, it is a graceful and engaging introduction to the workings of a scholar’s
art in and through development of a first-generation project of the Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities at UVa. The coming of the Web and the serious engagement of
John Unsworth with the creation of the Rossetti Archive so that it could be
served in a networked environment, not just a digital one, is crucial to the reflections in
Radiant Textuality. McGann’s report of the progress of digital
collection building documents a revelation — the coming into awareness of the
possibilities for ways of thinking differently, anew, and with renewed enthusiasm about
textual studies and interpretative work that finds many echoes in the digital scholarly
community in the last decade. McCarty also got his digital hands dirty, so to speak, through
his development of computational techniques to study the way personae are constituted
linguistically in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These experiences are
crucial.
McCarty’s unique contribution here is the singularity of his focus on digital humanities as
an epistemological undertaking. For this reason, contrast with the work of McGann is
particularly useful since it brings out sharply the outlines of McCarty’s orientation.
McCarty’s attention is shaped by an allegiance to analytic methods that aspire to the
objectivity of those used in empirical sciences while McGann’s is forged in an ever-increasing
insistence on the subjective inner-standing point as the locus from which knowledge is
produced. On the face of it, McGann’s approach would seem irreconcilable with the formalizing,
disambiguating constraints of computational technology, while McCarty’s deliberate adherence
to ratio seems calculated to fit this inquiry perfectly. But the strength of the field is
demonstrated by the fact that different as these two scholars are in their approach to digital
humanities, their work complements rather than cancels each other’s. The history of knowledge
in which McCarty wants to place digital humanities is scientific rather than literary in its
cultural affiliation, more in the lineage of philosophy of science (Thomas Kuhn,
Kurt Gödel, and Hans Gadamer) than that of poets and literary
philosophers (Mikhail Bahktin, Alfred Jarry, Francesco
Varela, or Roland Barthes). Humanists gravitate to various intellectual
poles, and our understanding of humanities computing will continue to expand when approached
through yet other intellectual avenues. Aesthetics, visual epistemology, and cultural
anthropology, for instance, leap to mind and the volumes pumped out through MIT Press,
Manchester University Press, and Harper’s Basic Books are ample testimony to the critical
industry of cyber-studies that crosses blurry boundaries somewhere near the edges of
humanities computing.
The four chapters that form the core of McCarty’s book each take up a different aspect of
digital humanities: modeling, genres, discipline, and computer science. He ends the book by
setting an agenda for the field that contains a number of very practical recommendations with
regard to building a professional community and establishing a broader awareness of the field
and its value across disciplines. But he begins with modeling, and rightly so, since
understanding the ways we give form to knowledge are crucial to any other insight. His
analysis emphasizes the activity of creating models as schematic, abstract structures, but he
quickly makes a compelling distinction between dynamic processes and static abstractions. Only
through an iterative process of feedback and rework can modeling remain open to the
intellectual challenge of humanistic inquiry. The concept of “the model” lies
at the heart of any analysis of a representation or expression of human intellect. Here
McCarty draws usefully on the critical literature in the sciences to make his points,
emphasizing the need for the self-reflexive method. Since, as McCarty points out, historians
and philosophers of science have long paid attention to the role played by models, that
critical literature provides a useful foundation for thinking about how we think about things
— and also, about thinking itself (albeit from within a specific disciplinary
perspective). Modelling the thinking process is the grail here, and though much of this
theoretical reflection gets swept aside in the heat of actually making digital artifacts, it’s
worthwhile to step back and remember that one of the great benefits of working in a digital
environment is the productive conflict between the habits of humanistic thought and those of
the logic-based systems on which computational activity depends. McCarty makes perhaps too
much of the authority of logic, and seems to place a priority on rational thought that I would
challenge on philosophical grounds (part characterological difference, no doubt, and part a
difference of intellectual training). I think the cultural authority of computing has rested
too squarely on an assumption of the intellectual validity of reason and rational process.
Challenges have to come from subjective and aesthetic realms with equal, and equally potent,
authority. But those are my thoughts, not McCarty’s. (As McGann is fond of saying, “The poets got it right.”) McCarty wrestles with mathesis to come to its
terms, perhaps in the belief that reason has a verifiability that gives it clout. In any case,
his allegiances are consistent, and he works to pull the interpretive uncertainties of
modeling into alignment with the procedurally self-conscious rigors of analytic method and out
of what he considers the fire (or rapids) of mere fashioning of form for convenience. Would he
allow the possibility that a computational model might work through an aesthetic provocation?
He seems to leave the way open since he concludes by noting a fundamental paradox, that though
we may aspire to (a pseudo or real) empirical method to model cultural artifacts, we
nonetheless have to realize that “modeling anything” is “an imaginative act”.
In the chapters that follow, “Genres”, “Discipline”, and “Computing”, McCarty addresses the way
scholarly activity, particularly that of creating commentary, changes in a digital
environment. Unlike the discussion of modeling, with its scientific reference frame, this is
squarely in humanist territory. Rethinking the notion of the library, document, and text are
all familiar conversations, hotly and richly discussed in the last few years in popular and
specialized realms. This brings McCarty to the business of defining a discipline, and he
borrows his terms here from cultural anthropology, casting a critically descriptive eye on the
emerging intellectual formations in digital humanities and their nascent institutionalization
in its early phase development as a “systematic science”. His
discussion of “Computing” explores the way automation is achieved,
with particular interest in and emphasis on the history of “rules of
thought” that find their effective (and instrumental) manifestation in algorithms.
The transformation of cultural artifacts and humanistic approaches into “computationally tractable data” is the central task of humanities computing in
McCarty’s view, and so he concludes his epistemological inquiries (all far more detailed,
subtly nuanced, richly referenced, and complex than my reductive account of them here) with an
appreciation of the extent to which computing has succeeded through formal means, however
qualified we must be about the limits of formal systems for modeling humanistic artifacts.
McCarty’s arguments are dense. This is not a book through which to be introduced to digital
humanities, but a book meant to prove that digital humanities can sustain a serious
intellectual inquiry about its methods. Its arguments are posed in a language of philosophic
investigation. Those looking for (or dependent on) concrete examples from case studies will
need to look elsewhere for a way into these debates. McCarty has ample sources and reference
points, and his experience with Ovid is at the heart of his discussions. But those without a
penchant for abstract discussion may find this text elusive and unnecessarily, pedantically
overworked at times. But Humanities Computing deserves considerable respect,
both for what it aims to do and does do — to frame the diverse activities of this
emerging field within a critical study of epistemology, calling into question basic premises
and politics of knowledge production. His works shows that this field is a worthwhile
intellectual undertaking, one that is humanistic at its core (concerned with the preservation
and continued reinterpretation of our cultural legacy) and disciplined in its means.
What McCarty doesn’t say, but could have on the basis of his study, is that humanities
computing may even be the most important humanistic project of our time. That preservation of
cultural heritage, as well as other patterns of access and use, will be carried out through
the electronic instruments we are currently making. The self-conscious awareness of the
substantive significance of that task is essential to making a place for this work within many
still-resistant and dismissive realms of academe where, to use McCarty’s apt phrase, many
contemporary scholar-teachers regard the computer as a “knowledge
jukebox” that simply plays whatever text or artifact they google on the screen. The
habituation to ease of access has blinded the academic community to the basic mediating
activity of computing as an act of modeling and representing knowledge. The most naïve
assumptions of vehicular attitudes towards digital media as transparent — and of
works of culture as self-evident — have heaped disdain on these activities among
practitioners in many traditional academic departments. As I write this, I mark significant
changes in the way digital humanities fits within the framework of institutional support and
priorities here at UVa. This is both a sign of maturation, the end of an initial phase of
explorative innovation, and a cautionary tale from which some sad but important lessons might
be learned.
But the shape of knowledge as we will know it is being modeled in digital environments and
instruments. The tools for understanding the interpretive force of choices made in structuring
these environments will come from every field of critical, cultural, media, and visual
studies. But only for those sensitive to the basic condition of all knowledge as mediated
representation. You would think that would include all humanist scholars, as well as
administrators — wouldn’t you? That it doesn’t shows how far we have to go with the
crucial social tasks ahead — to make the arguments within the culture of academia
that will make clear to the current and next generation of humanists the extent to which the
mediated condition of all knowledge is now shifted into digital frames — and that
any humanist encounter with such knowledge has to begin with a critical understanding of how
the very modeling on which artifacts appear to us in digital form works to constitute the
objects of our collective inquiry. The first step of the via negativa will
be Digital Media Studies, Understanding Digital Media, or Humanities Computing 101.
Are there things that McCarty’s book doesn’t do? Of course. But as digital humanities
continues to grow, this work will be among those that further reflection and inquiry,
providing a solid foundation of argument for the legitimacy of the field and rich detail as to
how and why that legitimacy has the historical shape that it does.
Works Cited
Hockey 2000
Hockey, Susan. Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
McGann 2001
McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Schreibman 2004
Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth. Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.
Sutherland 1997
Sutherland, Kathryn. Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.