An anomalous end-maker
conversation: 41, 21, 18, 13 or 8 years
computing the humanities
Willard McCarty
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King’s College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
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
3
John Stevens and Judy
Trogadis (Toronto),
Scanning electron
micrograph of a
neuronal circuit grown
in tissue culture on a
Motorola 68000
microprocessor, early
1980s
4
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
5
Snow
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning 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 portion
A 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)
6
Snow
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
Soundlessly
crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
World is
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
Is
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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8
9
10
11
Der liebe Gott
lebt im Detail!
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13
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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
15
IBM 704
16
IBM 7094
17
CDC6600
18
Osborne, IBM PC
and Macintosh
19
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
20
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
21
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]
22
Jukebox or toolbox?
23
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
24
Anomalous (what we value)
End-maker (what we are)
Conversation (what we do)
25
Gary Larson, The
Far Side Gallery
(New York:
Andrews and
McMeel, 1984)
26
James Cook’s landing in Poverty Bay, NZ, 1769
27
Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing (New York: Palgrave, 2005): 119
28
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)
29
anomalous end-maker conversation
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