| dc.description |
Many workers in the area of language and literature assume that users of computers are seeking to quantify aesthetic ‘results’. However, there is nothing in computer use which necessarily leads to the decontextualised or reductive logic of quantification. Indeed the use of computers can sharply foreground those contexts and contribute to the construction of valid actions and assessments of action that the humanities pursue. It has to be said, though, that some computer users are convinced by their colleagues and do pursue reductive activities. This also results from the historical cohabitation of modern science with mathematics, and the reductive paths of its technical application which transpose onto computer use in general.To meet the challenge of current institutional relegation, computer users in the humanities need thoroughly to investigate the grounds of their methodologies. Just as the social sciences in the 1960s and 70s, whose experience is at least partly analogous to our own, we need to explore the common grounds of our often very specialised activities and to study the implications of our responses so far to the strategies we have been offered. The discussion attempts to locate some common ground by introducing the ways in which all people in the humanities use a strategy which is held to be fundamental to computer use, the organization of data, it also attempts to extend our understanding of that common ground by considering the organization of data as one of the underlining methodological features of all computer applications in the humanities, and by suggesting a number of paths that could be explored in any attempt to define the broader ideological implications of what we are doing. |
