Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 30.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2026-05-30 17:04:52+00:00
        From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.29: what's wrong

Thank you, Willard, very much for your answer and for your answer to your
own question. But it sounds like the limitations of digital humanities are
all in computing. Why would we want to accept the limits of computing as
some kind of absolute thing that we must accept? It is not. I think hitting
a limit in that sense gives us a target or goal. Those limits motivate us
to create the technology that will give us what we want. This process goes
on constantly. It's just funded, massively, when massive profit potential
is involved. AI data centers? Oh yeah, we can make billions. So in this
area, the limits of digital humanities are in their profit potential. We're
building a large corpora of archives. That is great work, inherently
valuable work. But no one is going to get rich from it.

We are all playing with toys built to turn millionaires into billionaires
and billionaires into a trillionaire eventually. I don't see why we should
buy in to this economy except for the value or integrity of the work
itself.

Jim R

Jim Rovira asks why I think digital humanities is limited. I'd say,
> because we are, as finite creatures, along with all that we do. Digital
> humanities goes back to a finite-state machine, which in its application
> to the artefacts we study runs into what Stevan Harnad called "The
> symbol grounding problem" (1990)*, or what happens in "modeling the mind"
> (Harnad 1990). Not only does this problem remain unsolved (Harnad 2010)**,
> but it is the origin of all that's truly interesting in digital
> humanities itself. So, I'd say, ironically, our field of study is
> limited insofar as we fail to study the limits computing in the
> humanities encounters whenever pressed to the limits of what the machine
> can do at any one moment. By ignoring them, instead of taking them as
> characteristics of a different intelligence than our own, we fog the
> mind with chatter about the next release.
>
> Comments?
>
> WM
>


_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php