Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 100.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2023-06-13 06:07:45+00:00
From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.98: that thesis
Dear Willard,
Thanks for the explanation. I have ordered a copy of Graham M. Jones, Magic's
Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy. I must read and think.
Yours,
Ken
> On 12 Jun 2023, at 08:10, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 98.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
> [1] From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.96: more on that thesis: ? (61)
>
> [2] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: my thesis (50)
>
>
> --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: 2023-06-11 16:04:03+00:00
> From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.96: more on that thesis: ?
>
> Hi Ken,
>
> Treat Willard's thesis as a Fluxus piece.
>
> Take the essential contribution of computing to the
> humanities to lie in the analogical character of digital
> modelling, whose mode of expression is by nature
> simultaneously like and unlike our own, and then blink
> five and a half times.
>
> That should help, I think.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Tim
>
>
>> On 11 Jun 2023, at 08:09, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 96.
>> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>> Hosted by DH-Cologne
>> www.dhhumanist.org
>> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Date: 2023-06-10 07:05:31+00:00
>> From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.90: a thesis
>>
>> Hi, Willard,
>>
>> This thesis puzzles me a bit. I’m curious and I want to know more because I’m
>> not sure what you mean.
>>
>>> The essential contribution of computing to the humanities lies in the
>>> analogical character of digital modelling, whose mode of expression
>>> is by nature simultaneously like and unlike our own.
>>
>>
>> Would you please elaborate?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Ken
>>
>> Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The
> Journal
>> of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in
>> Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-
>> journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
>>
>> Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and
> Innovation
>> | Tongji University | Shanghai, China | Email ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com
|
>> Academia https://tongji.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I
> http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
>
>
> --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: 2023-06-11 07:10:44+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: my thesis
>
> First things first, i.e. Ken's question: "what you mean" by it.
>
> I had been reading Graham M. Jones, Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of
> Analogy (Chicago, 2017) on the complex history of analogy in the story
> of French illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin's programme to persuade
> the Algerians that the magic of their ritual performers was nothing but
> skilled deception. (He did this at the behest of the French colonial
> authorities to defuse a dangerous threat to their grip on power in North
> Africa from the Sufis. The evidence is patchy but thus is the story.) What
> interested me is the complexity, out of which Jones skilfully pulls the
> dialectic of analogy and disanalogy, that is, the two-way traffic between
> the analogised phenomena.
>
> To put the matter crudely, we are all the time finding likeness--oh! the
> computer is like the brain!--and quickly ditching the unlikenesses as
> mere residue of research, so much so we want to know WHAT IT REALLY
> IS. But the complexity isn't so much there as in the developmental
> process by which both analogical likenesses and unlikenesses go on to
> affect how we think about the analogised phenomenon and whatever
> is connected with it.
>
> Does that make sense enough to poke holes in it?
>
> Is not the computer a modelling machine? Are not models analogical.
> hence like and unlike simultaneously?
>
> So, Paul's most welcome rejoinder: "What about the essential
> contribution of humanities to computing?" What indeed. If we're talking
> about computing as a kind of engineering, then wouldn't answers come
> from asking that very question of older forms of engineering? This would
> send me to the likes of Walter Vincenti and Eugene Ferguson, and to
> historian Mike Mahoney. If a kind of architecture, then, among others,
> those listed by Neil Leach in Rethinking Architecture (1997) or to
> Annabel Jane Wharton's Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive,
> Addictive Lives of Buildings (2015). Oddly enough the question gets
> easier with the hugely difficult application of computing to modelling
> intelligence.
>
> But I am just thrashing around here. I think Paul could answer his own
> question better than I, or others here deeper into the technical side of
> computing than I've ever been.
>
> Yours,
> WM
>
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk
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