0.26 Underpinnings of the social edition  (Page 6/32)

2.2. critical contexts

2.2.1. knowledge representation

Other important critical contexts within which REKn is situated arise out of theories and methodologies associated with the emerging field of digital humanities. When considering a definition of the field, Willard McCarty warns that we cannot “rest content with the comfortably simple definition of humanities computing as the application of the computer to the disciplines of the humanities ,” for to do so “fails us by deleting the agent-scholar from the scene” and “by overlooking the mediation of thought that his or her use of the computer implies” (1998: n. pag.). After McCarty, Ray Siemens and Christian Vandendorpe suggest that digital humanities or “humanities computing” as a research area “is best defined loosely, as the intersection of computational methods and humanities scholarship” (2006: xii). See also Rockwell (1999).

A foundation for current work in humanities computing is knowledge representation , which John Unsworth has described as an “interdisciplinary methodology that combines logic and ontology to produce models of human understanding that are tractable to computation” (2001: n. pag.). While fundamentally based on digital algorithms, as Unsworth has noted, knowledge representation privileges traditionally held values associated with the liberal arts and humanities, namely: general intelligence about human pursuits and the human social/societal environment; adaptable, creative, analytical thinking; critical reasoning, argument, and logic; and the employment and conveyance of these in and through human communicative processes (verbal and non-verbal communication) and other processes native to the humanities (publication, presentation, dissemination). With respect to the activities of the computing humanist, Siemens and Vandendorpe suggest that knowledge representation “manifests itself in issues related to archival representation and textual editing, high-level interpretive theory and criticism, and protocols of knowledge transfer—all as modeled with computational techniques” (2006: xii).

2.2.2. professional reading and modeling

A primary protocol of knowledge transfer in the field of the humanities is reading. However, there is a substantial difference between the reading practices of humanists and those readers outside of academe—put simply, humanists are professional readers. As John Guillory has suggested, there are four characteristics of professional reading that distinguish it from the practice of lay reading:

First of all, it is a kind of work , a labor requiring large amounts of time and resources. This labor is compensated as such, by a salary. Second, it is a disciplinary activity, that is, it is governed by conventions of interpretation and protocols of research developed over many decades. These techniques take years to acquire; otherwise we would not award higher degrees to those who succeed in mastering them. Third, professional reading is vigilant ; it stands back from the experience of pleasure in reading […] so that the experience of reading does not begin and end in the pleasure of consumption, but gives rise to a certain sustained reflection. And fourth, this reading is a communal practice. Even when the scholar reads in privacy, this act of reading is connected in numerous ways to communal scenes; and it is often dedicated to the end of a public and publishable “reading” (2000: 31-32).