Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 140.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2025-09-22 15:27:11+00:00
From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.131: what is research
Dear Willard,
a very good – and extremely pertinent - question, pertinent to the state
and future of the Humanities. I apologize for the delay in the answer;
your post caught me traveling. I apologize further for the length of the
answer – this is a question which I have strong feelings about.
Let me describe first two experiences of my own, memories of which your
question immediately evoked.
(1) At the beginning of my career, as a young researcher responsible for
IT at the Max-Planck-Institute for History, I had frequently to
represent my institute in the group speaking for the users of the
computing centre supporting us and other Max-Planck-Institutes locally.
(“Max-Planck-Institutes” are research institutes in Germany, dedicated
to fundamental, as opposed to applied, research. Most of them are giants
with a couple of hundred scientists, dedicated to one or the other
subfield of the hard sciences. A few, definitely smaller ones, cover
fields of the Humanities. Some similarities to CNRS in France and CNR in
Italy exist.)
At one of the first meetings a young physics person asked me: “Oh,
Max-Planck-Institute for History. I always wanted to know what we need
that for. In History we know everything already in any case.” I politely
disagreed and pointed out that there were quite a few fundamental
problems we did not really have any answer for – e.g. the question why
in Europe BEFORE the industrial revolution the population exploded,
which was one of the enabling reasons for said revolution and all that
followed.
(2) About twenty years later I came across the title of Nussbaum’s “Not
for Profit.” I immediately ordered a copy … and had one of the greatest
disappointments of my life, ever. I always had learned, that we might
have to face some naïve hard scientists who doubted it, but that in
principle we, as historians, were just as important in the business of
uncovering knowledge sorely needed as the best of them. Nussbaum spoke
about people who in my opinion were Gymnasium teachers, teaching basic
skills of well-ordered thinking to teenies. If there is ONE argument for
the existence of a research oriented Humanities department at what I
understand a university to stand for, I missed it.
My reaction to (1) obviously shows that, even if I understood my
opponent to be just another poorly educated hard scientist with a naive
view of the world, I totally agreed with him, that the purpose of
“Wissenschaft” consisted of augmenting the pool of available knowledge.
(“Wissenschaft”: Once again that conflict between provinces of academia,
where the hard and the soft sciences - aka “Humanities” or at least a
part of them – are both considered integral parts of a larger whole,
describing the systematic rational analysis of the world. As opposed to
schools of thinking, which juxtapose them fundamentally.)
Part of the reason, why so many – not always young – hard science people
are so intolerably naive when it comes to understanding that Humanists
might also have unanswered questions is, that most of them consider
themselves explicitly, and all of them implicitly, as part of a mission
to realize a specific vision. “Uncovering the last secrets of
cosmology.” “Opening up an inexhaustible supply of power.” And they
cannot recognize such a vision in the Humanities.
In my opinion, too, “research” – when it goes beyond the tasks of a
politics “research intern” – implies such a vision / goal. “The
systematic rational analysis of the world” mentioned above requires such
a framework, if the exercise shall be taken serious. A history of the
garden gnome is of course a totally abstruse endeavor; except when it is
directed by an understanding, that the development of cheap ubiquitous
material objects may signal a specific process of strengthening social
identities in societies where other traditional mechanisms of expressing
such identities weaken. Which is of course only of interest, if we have
a broad vision of the need to understand, how various layers of societal
networks have developed over the millennia.
Interestingly – and quite contrary to the opinion that what Humanities
need most, is to be understandable by the common citizen – cosmology,
while most certainly incomprehensible to the common citizen, leave alone
the common politician, is never the less safe and secure in academia and
academic funding, even though it provides exactly no economic return. As
interestingly, the sheer promise of an inexhaustible supply of power was
sufficient to secure an inexhaustible supply of funding, even if fusion
research since the fifties has been a triumphant chain of breakthroughs
which successively shortened the remaining time to fusion’s commercial
viability from fifteen years to fifteen years. (No typo.)
Research, if understood to be the systematic rational analysis of the
world, needs a vision. Whether this vision is realistic is only
partially relevant – it is sufficient that it creates awe and respect
and striving for it means progress on a road that for the actual
practitioners is the goal.
What is the vision of the Humanities which justifies to engage in
researching it for the next millennium? I have a few private ideas when
it comes to history, but I do admit that I find it difficult to see it
in quite a few provinces of the Humanities in general and their digital
variety in particular.
I hope it has become clear, why I found Nussbaum so extraordinarily and
utterly disappointing. Critical thinking is not a result of research,
but a prerequisite. Tertiary education in my opinion should train people
to answer questions which will be discovered only after the demise of
the trainers. This tertiary training requires the students at the very
least to have a solid grounding in critical thinking before they start
research training.
From that perspective, I have to deviate a bit from the importance
assigned to the scholarly primitives, when it comes to the definition of
research, specifically to the definition of what constitutes the meaning
of research, most specifically the definition of what constitutes the
meaning of digital tools for research.
Traditionally the introduction of the possibilities opened up by
computers / digital technologies always gave a twofold answer. On the
one hand, computation, it was said, provided tools, which made it
possible to perform methodologically traditional studies faster or
easier to implement. On the other hand, however, computation was
supposed to open up the door to methodologically NEW types of research,
which would change some of the fundamentals beyond traditional approaches.
If you describe the scholarly primitives as the incarnation of the
application of computation to the Humanities, you simply say that we can
forget about the methodological innovation, which is to far from my
understanding of research described above to be acceptable.
Fun fact: In the original definition of the primitives, quoted by
Willard, I see seven of them: *Discovering, Annotating, Comparing,
Referring, Sampling, Illustrating, Representing.*
In David’s posting five remain: searching, collecting, reading,
writing and *collaborating.
Is it only me who notices that what is absent now, specifically
“comparing” and “sampling” are exactly those two primitives which are
most closely related to “analysis”? Which is from my point of view
already sorely missing from John Unsworth’s original paper.
Sorry folks, but administering your bibliography does not constitute
research.
Manfred
Am 15.09.25 um 07:06 schrieb Humanist:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 131.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to:humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2025-09-12 08:34:16+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty<willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: what is research?
>
> In response to the CFP Friday last, some memories of situations
> provoking that question.
>
> One is a statement of a colleague some years back, himself a fine
> researcher, who considering his department of many colleagues, exclaimed
> that no one was doing 'research'. From my perspective, he was wrong, but
> in a sense worth some thought.
>
> The other memory is of a conversation with a colleague in computer
> science, a computational linguist. I sat in his office describing what I
> was interested in and how I was investigating it. As I noticed he was
> not paying much attention, I felt as if I were a small insect that had
> flown into the room and was buzzing about almost inaudibly. Now and then
> he would notice something unidentifiable, then return to his musings,
> whatever they were.
>
> 'What is research?' is an excellent question. It seems to me that the
> starting point of any investigation into an unfamiliar discipline begins
> with it, or rather, with the question of what that discipline's members
> regard as research. We must ask, 'what is research in this or that
> discipline?'
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM
>
>
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
> Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk
--
Prof.em.Dr. Manfred Thaller
formerly University at Cologne /
zuletzt Universität zu Köln
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