An anomalous end-maker conversation: 41, 21, 18, 13 or 8 years computing the humanities

Willard McCartyCentre for Computing in the

HumanitiesKing’s College London

www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/

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1. The problem

2. Evidence from the real world

3. Personal computing, 1960s-1980s

4. Teaching and questioning

5. Words to remember and the places to which they lead

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74. Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?

www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

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John Stevens and Judy Trogadis (Toronto), Scanning electron micrograph of a neuronal circuit grown in tissue culture on a Motorola 68000 microprocessor, early 1980s

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1. The problem

2. Evidence from the real world

3. Personal computing, 1960s-1980s

4. Teaching and questioning

5. Words to remember and the places to which they lead

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Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window wasSpawning snow and pink roses against itSoundlessly collateral and incompatible:World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portionA tangerine and spit the pips and feelThe drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for worldIs more spiteful and gay than one supposes -On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Louis MacNeice (January 1935)

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Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window wasSpawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portionA tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Louis MacNeice (January 1935)

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Der liebe Gott lebt im

Detail!

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1. The problem

2. Evidence from the real world

3. Personal computing, 1960s-1980s

4. Teaching and questioning

5. Words to remember and the places to which they lead

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IBM 704

17IBM 7094

18CDC6600

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Osborne, IBM PC and

Macintosh

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1. The problem

2. Evidence from the real world

3. Personal computing, 1960s-1980s

4. Teaching and questioning

5. Words to remember and the places to which they lead

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What if the point were not trying to bridge that gap but to feed off and develop it?

Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 103

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Some men went fishing in the sea with a net, and upon examining what they caught they concluded that there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea.

R.W. Hamming, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”, American Mathematical Monthly 87.2 (Feb 1980): 89 [JSTOR]

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Jukebox or toolbox?

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1. The problem

2. Evidence from the real world

3. Personal computing, 1960s-1980s

4. Teaching and questioning

5. Words to remember and the places to which they lead

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Anomalous (what we value)End-maker (what we are)Conversation (what we do)

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Gary Larson, The Far Side Gallery (New York: Andrews and McMeel, 1984)

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James Cook’s landing in Poverty Bay, NZ, 1769

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Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing (New York: Palgrave, 2005): 119

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It is thus that the helmsman pits his cunning against the wind so as to bring the ship safely to harbour despite it. Victory over a shifting reality whose continuous metamorphoses make it almost impossible to grasp can only be won through a greater degree of mobility, an even greater power of transformation.

Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Chicago, 1978): 20; Les Ruses d’intelligence: La Mètis des grecs (Paris, 1974)

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anomalous end-maker conversation

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