Received notice of the new Web site for the Transforming the Disciplines: Computer Science and the Humanities conference which I attended here in town last month. Good trip report by Mike Lesk, though he misses the point that humanists currently use computers primarily as venues for representation, rather than as engines for computation:
I have trouble understanding what sorts of questions humanities researchers pose that computing can "answer," partly because many important humanities questions don't have simple answers. There will never be a one-word answer to "What was the cause of the American Revolution?" It does surprise me though that perhaps the mostly easily recognized result from the application of information technology to the humanities is more than forty years old: the Mosteller article on the authorship of the Federalist Papers.
On the other hand, I just bought Colin Martindale's The Clockwork Muse, which argues that the creative and aesthetic enterprise is subject to rule-governed behavior. Also found an interesting looking paper online that picks up where Martindale left off.
At the same conference, I thought Janet Murray put it rather well: in the humanities we feel that we can assert less and less about the world with language; in the sciences, they believe they can describe more and more of the world with math. Someone needs to convene a conference on the state of empirical knowledge in the humanities.
Posted by mgk at February 18, 2003 05:37 PM