Computing, Humanism, and
the Coming Age of Print
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Seminar:
Is Humanities Computing an Academic Discipline? |
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December 3, 1999 |
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On the assumption that no
academic enterprise can call itself a discipline until it learns to value
inquiry above certainty, I wish to meet a question with a question. This
seminar began by asking: Is humanities
computing an academic discipline? To which I can only respond: What else could it be? Though this
reply may seem suspiciously ironic, I mean it in simple sincerity, not as
wisecrack but as the dialectical opposite, an (apparently) foolish question. The preceding papers in
this seminar, which I have been privileged to read before writing, argue
compellingly for the growing importance of humanities computing within the
academy. Yet our (federated) (inter)discipline -- humanities computing,
multimedia, humanistic informatics, or whatever we choose to call it -- makes
its appearance in interesting times. As Willard McCarty notes, universities
"are now reconfiguring themselves to adapt to changing conditions of
societies that are no longer certain of what they're for" ("Interdiscipline") -- an uncertainty that perhaps
applies as much to societies as to universities. Conditions of textual
production and reception are changing in profound ways throughout the
culture, not just within the scholastic world, and while the concept of
academic discipline confers the benefit of focus it may also mask important
patterns of connection and consequence. To ask a less foolish question: what
might we mean by humanities computing if we looked oustide
the narrowly institutional context? Though I do not propose that we shed our
academic identity, I suggest we think about points of contact between our
discipline and a rapidly changing information culture. Geoff Rockwell has
introduced the Shandean theme and I follow him
gladly in this as in other things. The paper proceeds elliptically. Its first
two sections comprise a digression about the immediate future of book
publishing. The next section offers a thought experiment based on these
projections, followed by some notes toward a broader conception of humanities
computing as a discipline poised between academy and marketplace. First, however, a
commercial. 1. After
Amazon
Friends,
are you tired of paying inflated prices for books because some
TV-executive-turned-editor bet the farm on the wrong celebrity bio? Confused
about which of five multinational media combines owns your favorite imprint this week? Wondering why you need to pay
for 300 pages when you only intend to read 30? Fed up with Fed Ex charges for
shipping your books to At the moment, dear
reader, you are out of luck, but moments pass quickly these days. We are
living through the first great explosion of electronic commerce, and while
the short-term economics of the outburst may be obscene ("irrational
exuberance" is a poor euphemism), its cultural consequences seem more
promising, or at least less likely to disappear in the inevitable crash. This
holds particularly true for information-intensive industries such as
publishing. Amazon.com has spun off
into what it hopes are richer markets, but before it turned to toys,
cosmetics, and power tools, Amazon assaulted a major pillar of the publishing
industry: the physical point of sale. The resulting shock was felt around the
business world and generally (mis)taken for the big
bang of e-commerce. Most of us are now learning to live with the fallout.
Many academics enjoy Amazon's innovations on a regular basis, even if we may
not fully grasp their broader implications; but such innocence cannot last
forever. The information market continues to evolve. As far as information
businesses are concerned, Amazon was only the first stage of a more radical
process. Pillars once uprooted
have a way of crashing domino-style into other megalithic assumptions, in
this case the belief that a book
must be a tangible object of a certain size and mass. In a fundamental sense,
today's books begin as bits. Most print works produced since the late 1970s
have existed initially in electronic form, as typesetters' data tapes if not
word processor files. What we call publishing
today is in large measure the business of converting these bits into print on
paper, transferring that material structure to consumers, and making money in
the process. There is great concern lately about the fate of this enterprise.
Much polemical ink has been shed by those who insist that books not be
reduced to bits, an argument that often devolves into claims about sovereign
authorship, reading in the bathtub, and old jam stains (see most recently Gass) but generally misses the crucial point. Print is an undeniably
useful, felicitous, and irreplaceable medium. That oldtime
literacy has much to recommend it, especially in an age of digital
simulation. Programming, we might remind ourselves, still depends on
alphanumeric syntax and sophisticated patterns of structure and reference. Hypertextuality is not an enemy of traditional forms but
their natural ally: witness Amazon. No one is about to launch a paperless society.
Yet on the other hand, after half a millennium of refinement the printing
press remains a cumbersome and inconvenient appliance ill suited to personal
use. Not so the laser printer. Now that bookselling has been separated from
the point of sale, it seems logical to extend our critical scrutiny to the
stage of material production. Why do we still mass-produce books when we can
print on demand? Books that begin as bits
need not remain in that state, but there may be good reason to keep them in
digital form longer than we do at present. Even after Amazon, most book
purchases still involve shipment of a prefabricated item from a warehouse via
postal or courier service. Given existing technology, however, the
information encoded in that bulky object could be transmitted in seconds
either directly to the consumer or to a vendor-manufacturer who would (in
every sense) make up the volume. Printing might be undertaken in a number of
settings and styles, from output on a personal printer (as we may do now for
software manuals and the like), to inexpensive printing and binding at a
local copy shop (as in course packets), to high-quality artisanal production
for books of special importance, with perhaps even a place for conventional
press runs of titles with genuinely wide appeal. Mass-market chain bookstores
would probably vanish from this new media ecology, but they could be replaced
by small businesses combining the fine old art of bookselling (serving as
informed guide to the literary world) with the estimable craft of printing
and binding. 2. The coming age of
print
Given these changes, the
outlook for existing publishers seems challenging at best -- a fact only
partly appreciated in the business. At least one major firm (Random House)
seems to be betting against print-on-demand, if its decision to build the
world's largest book warehouse in western Yet if our myths about
the end of the Cold War are any guide, economies based on centralized
production diverge significantly from those predicated on consumer demand.
These differences could make a difference not just for publishing but for the
literary culture of the next century. I cannot discuss these implications
fully within such a limited digression, but a few key points need mentioning.
First, there may be bad
news for the publishers of Books in
Print unless they too are prepared to shift bitwise. A
print-on-demand publishing model would likely expand the number of available
titles by a very large factor, especially if selection continues to attract
customers, as it does for Amazon and its competitors, and as the profit axis
shifts from mass to niche markets. Though some titles would still become
unavailable (the term out of print
seems about as useful here as horseless
carriage), this outcome would probably be accidental rather than
programmatic -- and much more easily reversible. There is no overwhelming
reason why a print-on-demand market should depend on artificial scarcity.
Publishers would have an economic incentive to keep titles available and much
less substantial reasons to withhold them. Authors might assert their right
to republish personally any properties not kept in circulation, suggesting
some interesting shifts in the relationship of writers and publishers. This grand expansion of
the catalog would have many implications.
Publications might generate revenue far longer than they do now, allowing authors
to publish fewer, better books (or to profit more highly from a line of
mediocrities). The number of people able to sustain themselves by writing
might actually increase, unthinkable as that seems. On the other hand,
competition for readers' attention would certainly intensify, suggesting that
conglomeratized publishers might turn at least
initially to mass-market promotion and celebrity culture as checks on market
diffusion. Market changes would not come without resistance and even
transient reversals. In the long run, though, it is probably impossible to
confine readers to a short bestseller list or a thin catalog
as eligible alternatives mount into hundreds of millions. Sooner or later,
today's mass-market publishing paradigm seems sure to collapse. In light of these
prospects, statements like the following seem both poignant and revealing: "I
don't really see myself doing anything dramatically different in changing the
way that The source of these
remarks is George Witte, recently named editor in chief at 3. Computing? Humanities?
I offer these
speculations without any warranty of predictive value. Even if my suggestions
prove more visionary than prophetic, however, they should have some interest
as foundations of a thought experiment. Consider this question: Does print-on-demand publishing count as
humanities computing? Construe the second term any way you like
-- as text-based analysis, as interdisciplinary methodology, as theory and
practice of digital multimedia, or as some new, hybrid science called
humanistic informatics. Would the shifts in the literary market I have
outlined hold any significance for these ventures? Why or why not? On first consideration, why not may seem obvious: because
the delivery of printable texts via the Internet does not appear to use
digital resources in any technologically ambitious or progressive way.
On-demand publishing may seem orthogonal not just to humanities computing but
to computing in general, at least if we associate that subject with something
other than mundane utility. From a scholarly perspective, the data processing
needed to bitstream books seems about as trivial as
what goes on in car engines or microwave ovens. It is hard to imagine a
research course in household computing (these days even at MIT). This dismissal defines
computing far too narrowly, though. Those who know the difficulty of
designing markup languages, databases, and encoding
protocols might make a strong contrary case. Even in purely instrumental
applications, digital technology is never as simple as non-specialists imagine.
Beyond this, the transformations I suggest are not simply mechanical.
Publishing on demand implies more than just moving texts through the wires,
just as retailing involves more than transfer of goods at point of sale.
Demand presumes selection which in turn implies browsing. Before a title can
be delivered a prospective reader needs to locate, identify, and examine it.
My scenario applies not simply to traditional texts (books) but to a vast
meta-text that we presently call by many names: the library, the archive, the
catalog, the set of books in print. When that
meta-text comprises hundreds of millions of items, the representation of
options will be far from trivial. Solutions for this problem will require
considerable sophistication. On some level they will still involve computing
in the original sense (simple mathematics) but it seems better to separate
these basic functions from computing of a different sort. Sherry Turkle suggests an important ground for distinction: The
personal computer culture began with small machines that captured a
post-1960s utopian vision of transparent understanding. Today, the personal
computer culture's most compelling objects give people a way to think
concretely about an identity crisis. In simulation, identity can be fluid and
multiple, a signifier no longer clearly points to a thing that is signified,
and understanding is less likely to proceed through analysis than by
navigation through virtual space. (49) Turkle's remark signals a momentous shift
in perspective, stemming from her reading of the Internet as the postmodern
form of information technology. In Turkle's view
navigation succeeds analysis as primary mode of signification in spatialized, social information systems. After the
Internet we understand computing differently; and indeed this "we"
includes some virtually present company. Though he writes in a very different
vein, Willard McCarty echoes Turkle when he warns
of the problematic tendency toward disambiguation implicit in purely
analytical uses of literary computing ("Interdiscipline").
Analysis does not close off the space of alternative possibilities. Likewise,
by introducing "ergodics" or path work as a principle of textual
expression, Espen Aarseth
reveals one of the ways in which navigation may constitute a form of
understanding (5). If there is any
significant connection between the changes I anticipate in the literary
market and what we do in humanities computing, it will grow out of insights
like Turkle's, McCarty's, and Aarseth's
that treat computing as a complex signifying practice. We must be prepared to
see beyond "transparent understanding," and take up problems of simulaton, navigation, and other challenges of
"virtual space" as primary problems for humanities computing. The work might come naturally.
A skeptical, ambiguating
approach has long been characteristic of the humanities, even before the
poststructuralist turn from which Turkle draws her
inspiration; but one may legitimately wonder what this way of thinking has to
do with market changes and business models, which after all depend on that
disambiguating practice called bookkeeping. Perhaps publishing on demand
qualifies as an interesting application of computing, but that interest may
seem better situated in a school of business or department of social science
than in any branch of the humanities. Historians, philosophers, and literary
scholars might benefit considerably from a new book market, but they may be
no more concerned about the details of its implementation than they are about
present online bookselling. Humanists care deeply about books, of course, but
the books in question come mainly from research libraries and academic
presses, neither of which (ostensibly) has much connection with retail
publishing. Why bother about the marketplace? Within a certain narrowly
defined, technology-averse definition of the humanities, this objection may
be unassailable; but for humanities computing it seems very hard to sustain.
Consider Willard McCarty's earlier attempt to define our enterprise,
introduced by John Unsworth at the start of these
discussions: Humanities computing is
an academic field concerned with the application of computing tools to arts
and humanities data or to their use in the creation of these data.
("What Is Humanities Computing?") The "data" of
the humanities are for the most part written records -- books, articles,
periodicals, broadsides, manuscripts, notebooks, theses, musical scores, pamplets, diaries, manifestoes, et cetera. By and large
we find these objects in the library or archive, as relics of the past. But
we cannot fix our attention solely on what has gone before. Data is past
participle, that which is given, but in the humanities we tend not to accept
the given without skepticism or inquiry. We
interrogate sources, we argue derivations, we
construct genealogies: we navigate as well as analyze. We are intimately
concerned with the way discourses are framed and articulated, socially and
materially. This tendency to look
beyond initial premises into the origins of discourse underlies the latter
half of McCarty's definition: the use of computing tools "in the
creation of these data." This phrase reminds us that humanities
computing is not simply a retrospective undertaking but one that looks
forward as well. We need to care about new books as well as old, and thus by
extension about innovative ways of circulating forms of writing. It remains
to be seen, however, what such prospective engagement might mean in practical
terms and how this engagement affects our disciplinary schemes. 4. Academy and market
Because this brief sketch
can only accomodate limited discussion, I apologize
in advance for omissions, including one that is both categorical and
deliberate. I intend to overlook an area in which I have an obvious interest
and which several contributors to this seminar have singled out: experimental
and creative work in electronic media, including hypermedia narrative, cybertext, virtual architecture, and other forms of
digital art. Work of this sort may contribute significantly to humanities
computing and I would not exclude it from our schemes, but it seems best left
aside if our main concern lies with the traditional literary marketplace. Theory, on the other
hand, needs more immediate discussion. I have already mentioned Turkle, both of whose major studies (The Second Self as well as Life on the Screen) seem excellent
models for our theoretical agenda and are both quite notable for their
awareness of the Internet as a social and commercial phenomenon. Similarly
important work has been done recently by Janet Murray, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and
Roseanne Stone. All these figures have had or should have enlightening things
to say about literature, publishing, and emerging information spaces. The
fact that all are women is both unsurprising and indicative. Turkle's emphases on bricolage, emergent forms,
negotiations of identity, and social applications of technology suggest that
humanities computing could be a strong alternative to more rigidly defined, instrumental
approaches that alienate many women (and men) from other forms of computing. It also seems noteworthy
that only one of the theorists mentioned above (Hayles)
is primarily a literary critic. As Espen Aarseth suggests, the attempt to derive theories of new
media directly from literary poststructuralism
appears to have reached its limit ("Humanistic Informatics").
Though I think our field should address itself to the immediate future of the
book, we need theoretical approaches that no longer struggle primarily
against the hegemony of writing, and especially of print -- a standard by
which some of my own earlier work may be found wanting. Jay Bolter and
Richard Grusin's concept of
"remediation," focusing on the interaction of coexisting
technologies, seems potentially more valuable in this regard. However, any
kind of theoretical abstraction risks losing touch with material and social
phenomena, as perhaps in this case: What
remains strong in our culture today is the conviction that technology itself
progresses through reform: that technology reforms itself. In our terms, new
technologies of representation proceed by reforming or remediating earlier
ones, while earlier technologies are struggling to maintain their legitimacy
by remediating newer ones. (Bolter and Grusin, 61) Simply to equate
technological interaction with "reform" skates perilously close to meliorism and glosses over the frictions that arise between institutions in the process of change.
The visionary strain may serve better in thought experiments than in media
theory. The transformation from mass-market publishing to publishing on
demand might indeed improve upon the present system, but one wonders if
champions of the status quo like Mr. Witte of My quibbling aside,
remediation theory may shed much light on the coming developments in the
literary marketplace. I think however we will also want accounts that
emphasize imperfection, resistance, and even failure. In this respect
McCarty's notion of "modelling" seems a better frame of reference: The
point of modelling is not to establish the truth directly, since models are
never true; it is to achieve failure so as to raise and point the question of
how we know what we know.... ("Interdiscipline")
Strictly speaking, of
course, McCarty's statement is not theoretical, at least not in Bolter and Grusin's sense. By "modelling" he means not
abstract representations of cultural forms but the implementation in
analytical software of assumptions about specific acts of writing. I am
taking his remark out of context for a particular reason: to illustrate how
much better we may be served by theories that are strongly grounded in
application. It follows, as Geoff Rockwell argues, that humanities computing
must be as much a productive as a reflective discipline (Rockwell). We must
not simply write about changes in publishing and literary culture, but must
make material contributions to emerging practices. In this respect the more
pragmatic side of our textual computing ventures may represent at least the
equal, if not the senior partner, of theory. Management of very large
corpora, whether in commercial publishing or academic archives, will demand
considerable development of current markup,
editing, and presentation tools, most immediately SGML and XML. The Text
Encoding Initiative and centers like HITC at the The more pragmatic side
of the hypertext community (not the literary wing which Aarseth
so distrusts) also offers some useful examples. Jim Rosenberg's description
of electronic document spaces in terms of transactions rather than static
structures suggests important new avenues for the design of browsing systems
( This last example
suggests perhaps the most exciting application of humanities computing -- in
its oldest sense, by the way -- to the next age of print. With many millions
of titles potentially available, readers and publishers will need new ways of
describing and associating texts. The most significant challenge to browsing
and navigation lies in the disappearance of the bookstore or library shelf.
As Amazon and its competitors demonstrate, the first logical replacement for
the shelf is some system of information retrieval -- e.g., Amazon's various
devices for suggesting other titles the shopper might add to her cart.
Presently these suggestions are based on sales data -- people who bought book X also bought book Y
-- a fairly crude instrument for eliciting textual relationships. What if
readers had access not simply to a retail database query but to full-text
searching algorithms -- the sorts of sophisticated tools familiar to
computing humanists? These systems might more usefully answer questions like:
Who elses
writes this way? Where did these ideas come from? and How can I find
out more? The possibilities for such applications remind us that
navigation and analysis are not mutually exclusive -- and most importantly,
that McCarty's notion of empirical modelling may have direct relevance to the
marketplace as well as the academy. 5. Conclusion
None of these
speculations are meant to elide the real, enduring, and beneficial
differences between scholarship and commerce -- I do not argue for
humanitiesComputing.com. I also need to acknowledge that much of what we
believe as academics differs diametrically from business doctrine. At the
risk of proving that this paper is simply a footnote to McCarty's (though
worse things could happen), I turn to him yet again: By
nature humanities computing... challenges issues of ownership, which is to
say, reveals that many [source materials] are held in common and there is
much to be gained from sharing them. If its real potential is understood,
humanities computing can be quite threatening to the status quo. ("Interdiscipline") As the status quo evolves
away from mass-market publishing -- and as distinctions between the
commercial marketplace and university research libraries begin to blur, at
least in terms of sheer volume -- we may find ourselves pressed to defend our
ways of thinking and our differences from the commercial culture. This task demands a very
clear sense of the moment. We should I think maintain a balance between
retrospect and prospect, especially at a time when the past in the form of
book culture may be in for considerable renovation and re-formation, if not
remediation and reform. As my defense of theory
should indicate, we also need to maintain our capacity for detachment and
generalization, faculties which work best when tempered by practical
engagement. The possibilities for such engagement -- numerous already and
likely to expand considerably in the next decades -- may represent the
greatest innate strength of our undertakings. Whatever we call ourselves (and
it seems wise to keep up several aliases), humanities
computing/multimedia/hypermedia/humanistic informatics clearly comprises the
core of a discipline. If we hew to our agendas, especially our commitment to
practicing what we teach, we may prove in the long run to be the heart and
future of the humanities. Acknowledgements
Thanks to Mark Bernstein
of Eastgate Systems for correcting my understanding
of bestseller lists. Works Cited
Aarseth, Espen.
Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Aarseth, Espen.
"From Humanities Computing to Humanistic Informatics: Creating a Field
of Our Own." Seminar: Is Humanities Computing an Academic Discipline? Bernstein, Mark, Jay
David Bolter, Michael Joyce, and Elli Mylonas.
"Architectures for Volatile Hypertext." Hypertext '91 Proceedings. Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Carvajal, Doreen. "An Insider is
Named to Head St. Martin's." New York Times 22 November, 1999.
C17. Gass, William. "In Defense of the Book: On the Enduring Pleasures of Paper,
Type, Page, and Ink." Harper's
Magazine. 299 (November, 1999): 45-51. Marshall, Catherine.
"Toward an Ecology of Hypertext
Annotation." Hypertext '98 Proceedings. McCarty, Willard.
"What is Humanities Computing? Toward a Definition of the Field"
http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/essays/what/. McCarty, Willard.
"Humanities Computing as Interdiscipline."
Seminar: Is Humanities Computing an Academic Discipline? O'Brien, Dennis.
"Rewriting the Chapter on Big." "Barnes and Noble
Gets Stake in Web Publisher." New York Times 3 November 1999: C4.
Rockwell, Geoffrey.
"Is Humanities Computing an Academic Discipline?" Seminar: Is
Humanities Computing an Academic Discipline? Rosenberg, Jim. "The
Structure of Hypertext Activity". Hypertext '96 Proceedings. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. |
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URL: http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/uva99/