Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 454.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
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        Date: 2025-04-10 07:09:46+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: the value of pinboards

Like John Naughton, as someone actively engaged in research, little of
it in 'DH'*, I have consequently little personal interest in the items
pinned to Humanist's board, though I pin all of them there myself, as
Editor. I continue to do so primarily not to promote DH but with the
historian of such activities in mind. Irving Goffman's favourite
question comes to mind; "What is it that is going on here?" To my mind
that question can always be asked of any human activity and is always
worth asking. So I keep pinning things up.

Also I very much doubt that a serious attempt to separate newsy items to
be pinned from those deserving discussion would work, indeed could be
done by algorithm. I certainly won't do that. There's only one solution:
dig deeper into what's going on, or look more widely, and ask questions
that cannot be answered, only turned into better questions...

*As for 'DH'.  I make a distinction between 'ΑΙ’ and 'artificial
intelligence'- because the acronym really says something different. I
was interested to hear from a colleague at Stanford that students who
want to learn enough to get jobs in Silicon Valley as soon as possible
say (he has observed) they want to do 'AI', not 'artificial
intelligence', i.e. research. Even if this is not universally the case,
even if not so at Stanford, I think the distinction is a very useful
one, and would recommend that scholars in 'digital humanities' observe
the analogous one.

Many years ago, my colleague Russ Wooldridge created a publication 
series in the field then called 'humanities computing', CH Working 
Papers <https://chwp.artsci.utoronto.ca>. In the headnote you will 
find a quite important remark explaining what the series would be 
all about:

"CH Working Papers... are an interdisciplinary series of refereed 
publications on computer-assisted research. They are a vehicle 
for an intermediary stage at which questions of computer 
methodology in relation to the corpus at hand are of interest to 
the scholar before the computer disappears into the background."

That disappearance he was complaining about tends nowadays 
to take a different form, but it hasn't stopped happening. We do 
need to ask, and continue to ask, Goffman's question of 'DH', 
don't you think?

Comments welcome.

All best,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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