Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 460.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2025-04-13 11:11:58+00:00
        From: Julian Rohrhuber <rohrhuber@protonmail.com>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.457: what sources of fascination?

What motivates me is the elegance and conciseness in programming.
It condenses what Gell saw in kolams and carvings into something
that not only challenges the observer's ability to understand it
but at the same time makes a computer enact an equally labyrinthine
ritual. I do adore those programming pearls written in assembler,
but I grew into programming languages that are closer to algebra,
for me especially for sound programming.

I am glad Gell comes up, because his work has been very influential to me.
As you point out, for Gell in the Enchantment text, technology comes with
a tacit magical trajectory: it could in principle work absolutely without
effort. This tendency towards the vanishing of labour is very much part of
computing and computer science. Sometimes, "real computation" is presented
as fundamentally opposed to "merely theoretical computation", almost like
fact against illusion, or the other way round as well.

A sober anthropological perspective may allow us to see this differently.

Yours,
Julian Rohrhuber
https://wertlos.org/~rohrhuber/




>        Date: 2025-04-11 07:00:33+00:00
>        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
>        Subject: source of fascination?
>
> A motivational question. I would assume--painfully obvious, no?-- that
> nowadays very few people involved at the technical side of digital
> humanities work directly with 'machine language' or 'assembler
> language'. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that those terms need
> explaining to those younger than I. In the 1960s I worked for years
> writing routines in such language and so thinking in terms of the most
> primitive commands, such as 'shift left accumulator'. I found that work
> utterly fascinating, was attracted to computing machines in that way,
> imagining the mechanical operations, enjoying the illusion of direct,
> hand-on control.
>
> So my question: what attracts people now about working with digital
>
 machines? People like us? Do those in digital humanities these days
> know enough about the machinery to be as charmed as I was--indeed,
> still am?
>
> Some here may know of the anthropologist Alfred Gell's "The technology
> of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology", in The Art of
> Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (Oxford: Berg, 1992). Gell argues
> that "Magic haunts technical activity like a shadow" (p. 181), drawing
> on the complex, highly skilled woodcarving found on the prow-boards
> of canoes from the Trobriand Islands. In the Trobriand islanders' culture,
> these carvings are intended to fascinate their trading partners to such
> an extent that they will lulled into giving the canoe owners much better
> deals than they would otherwise be inclined to do. I was never that
> charmed by assembler language, but I do have some sense of what the
> victims of that wonderful carving fell prey to.
>
> Comments and biographical snippets welcome :-).
>
> Yo
urs,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk
>


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