Summit, evening the first.
I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia at the summit on digital tools for the humanities. It’s almost 10:30pm, I’ve got to catch a 7:30am bus to campus for breakfast and a day of intense work, and I’m jazzed to the point of spinning in the elevator.
The flights were fun, and even flying out of Providence at the ungodly hour of 6am was rewarded by one of those perfectly cloudless full-rainbow-spectrum sunrises. I read and read materials for the summit, and am happy to report that I completed the reading before getting to the hotel. The hotel gave me a warm chocolate-chip cookie upon check-in.
Today was a reception and dinner, followed by the usual greetings and a keynote by Brian Cantwell Smith, a computer scientist from U of Toronto. The man knows how to talk. He gesticlated wildly, looking at times as if he was about to leap towards us from behind the podium. He talked quickly and intensely, and yet managed to keep most of the audience.
Here are some points he brought up, rephrased by me; any brilliance is his, flat language would be mine. I haven’t entirely digested all of this, so present it mostly without commentary. Your thoughts, though, would be much appreciated.
Digital is a trendy word, he said, second only to like on college campuses.
Descartes was a smart guy. He separated the work, or process, of understanding the world from the world thereby understood.
Controversial revelation of this talk: computers don’t actually exist. There do exist many devices, but what are they?
Around the turn of the 20th century, we discovered that we could fuse meaning and mechanism. An example of this would be us. This idea eventually gave birth to computers.
Computers aren’t anything special, and computer scientists aren’t studying anything special. Or maybe anything in particular. This is liberating: instead of a restricted domain, they have a sort of monopoly on the universe.
We (computing humanists) shouldn’t be party to propagating the dualism between the ostensible “abstract” and the concrete. A server going down loses not the representation of mail, but actual mail.
Descartes said that we should have clear and distinct ideas. But this isn’t the way the world actually works.
Maybe the tools we build are digital at the level of the bits, but what matters about them is humanistic.
Computers are a historical moment (a long one, which started in the mid-1800s and is still going) in which we are getting past Descartes.
Matter is both a noun and a verb. Material comes from matter.
Computing is allowing us to get past the temporary, 300-year divorse between matter-noun and matter-verb.
Our commitment to what it means to be human shouldn’t be ideological (“if it’s human, it’s good”).
People can be special as in worthy of study and careful consideration, not special as in this is where inquiry stops because there’s nothing more to say.
…
That’s it for now. If you’re interested in one or more elements of this, comment and we’ll talk (in comments). I’m too tired to attempt an actual argument. Tomorrow is another day, with more photography and some serious hyperte… I mean, blogging.
September 29th, 2005 at 12:03 pm
While I don’t necessarily disagree with exploding the false dichotomy of abstract/concrete, I would note that, for the most part, a smtp mail server going down does not result in the loss of actual mail; generally there is a backup mx that handles email for the host until the original comes back up. Even for storage, there is usually a backup of some sort. So it seems to me like the fact that almost every digital artifact has >1 concrete manifestations does somewhat change the nature of things. Not sure that really adds much to the discussion, but I thought I’d mention it.
September 29th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
Granted, multiple copies are good, and indeed that example is a bit misleading: the mail doesn’t actually get lost, a lot of the time. But I think his point was that none of those copies is more “authentic” than the others; each of them is the mail as opposed to some hypothetical mirror image of something real which is to be found elsewhere.
I’ve no idea whether that makes sense outside my own head. :)
September 30th, 2005 at 1:16 am
You might like this book
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1564784169/amzna9-1-20/ref=nosim/002-6218999-8933617?dev-t=D26XECQVNV6NDQ%26camp=2025%26link_code=xm2
The overarching theme is what happens when a simulacrum becomes indistinguishable from the real thing, but he manages to move rather harmoniously between Buster Keaton, Turing, Swift, automata in the French court…