Technology, Scholarship, and the Humanities:
The Implications of Electronic Information
The Intellectual Implications of Electronic Information
Oleg Grabar
School of Historical Studies
Institute for Advanced Study
Abstract
The paper argues or proposes for discussion the following points:
Thus far, scholarship (as distinguished from learning) in the humanities is
neither hampered nor helped by the availability and apparent possibilities of
electronic information. Access to the sources, secondary and eventually
primary, essential to accomplish that scholarship is being revolutionized by
electronic information. While theoretically and potentially positive, this
revolution exhibits a number of problems reviewed in this essay.
Educational opportunities are easier to acknowledge and to imagine in the
future than those of scholarship. The computer increases not only the
confusion between "facts" and interpretation, but also the possibility of
unexpected questions and results. This confusion could result in increasing
analytic rigor that would make the humanities examine and explain its
intellectual bases.
Since all existing information can never be processed, there are ethical and
in a sense political or ideological problems in how the information to be made
available is selected.
© Oleg Grabar, 1993
Scholars in the humanities did not dream of computers or computer-like
instruments, nor did they invent them. They rarely, if ever, contributed to
their design or to the design of anything dealing with the mechanics of
electronic information. And most of them were--many still are--appalled by the
arrogant illiteracy of computer manuals, by the transformation of so many
familiar and friendly words (icon, image, menu, window, document, etc.) into
frightening expressions, and by the seemingly wasteful irrelevance of so many
new gestures like fiddling with a mouse or constantly "returning," of new
designs for working spaces, of the invasion of the sacred and private study by
screens and keyboards more readily associated with public airline ticket
offices or with anonymous banks.
Some of these negative reactions have been overcome, as the word processor's
superiority over the most elaborate typewriter is recognized by most writers of
learned articles or by most compilers of reading lists and bibliographies.
Word processors, it is true, are a bit expensive and, perhaps because no one
user's manual seems able to explain clearly what various keys can do, the
feeling remains that heavy artillery is used to kill a fly, especially because
no one really wants to do much that can be done with word
processors.[1]
But these doubts and annoyances do not
really affect the acceptance of an instrument whose flexibility and versatility
were enhanced by academic administrations which distributed them with so many
discounts that any alert citizen of universities should have sensed something
suspicious lurking behind the ivy.
Several parallel activities were in fact taking place. The most immediately
significant one for daily life was the transformation of library catalogues
into video machines. The old gesture of flipping cards, which made one feel in
professional partnership with centuries of humanistic knowledge, disappeared as
we were all transfigured into simple-minded operators of spaceships. We were
made to relinquish past associations and to join a new crowd in which our
students and our children were faster and more efficient than we were. The
revolution in access to the holdings of collections is final (even if not
complete as yet), and I will return to some of its implications.
There were also meetings with all sorts of intense young men and women brought
around by one's more progressive colleagues to find out how computers could
help us do whatever we were doing. It is not without amused sadness that I
recall these meetings, for so many of us thought in messianic terms about the
sudden availability of (for example) all works of Islamic architecture on a
disk programmed so as to provide answers to all of one's questions today and in
the future and with pictures on the screen as an added benefit; about
all museum catalogues combined into one gigantic catalogue of all works of art
available to all; about the Index of Christian Art being usable without the
need to travel to Princeton or Washington; about information on legal
documents, dates according to many calendars, and on biblical references
accessible at the push of a few buttons in a correct sequence; and so on.
There was something desperate about these meetings (at least most of the ones I
attended) and about the dreams that accompanied them, for two reasons. One was
the vain and embarrassing feeling that the stature of our work would be
enhanced by the use of all these new techniques that adorned the laboratories
of our colleagues in the sciences and the NASA centers in Houston; finally, we
thought, we would be recognized as the scientists we meant to be. The other
and altogether far more important reason was that the new ways seemed to
resolve one set of the humanist's traditional problems, especially in the
competitive "scientistic" atmosphere of the decades after World War
II.[2] The
problem was the rapidly waning control
over too many languages compounded with too many publications that were
supposed to be read (not just listed), the endless surveys of sources without
purpose, and repeated pronouncements on the "state of the art" of anything.
These and other paraphernalia of scholarship appeared everywhere thanks to the
multiplication of centers for learning which acquired visibility by showing off
the work of others, to easy funds for travel to successions of learned
meetings, and to the expansion of knowledge beyond its earlier Eurocentric
confines. Some humanists, of course, did not notice these changes; to them the
old adage that orientalia (or slavica) non legenda sunt
remained in effect. Others, especially the ones with open and generous minds,
had to find ways of incorporating all these novelties within their own work.
If only a machine would free the scholar from learning Hungarian or Mongolian
and tell him what Korean scholarship on the Italian Renaissance is up to!
Pipe--or real--dreams were one thing. There were also achievements, as disks
and programs made their way into scholarly confines, some furtively and
secretly like a disk that converts Hijrah dates into Common Era ones, others
playfully like an atlas that provides the national anthem of every sovereign
country, others yet as major scholarly achievements or projects expected to
become such achievements (in particular collections of texts with sophisticated
indices).
Professional life today is deluged with bytes, CD-ROMs, and mainframes. One
can run to them as one goes to fashion shows, praise them all as wonderful but
not up to snuff; yet, in the aggregate, they provide a very definite vision of
a scholar a generation from now. His or her desk would go around the room and
will have equipment that could offer simultaneously all of the following
(all my examples are based on programs I know to exist or to be fairly far
along in planning, especially in my own, particularly underdeveloped, field of
the history of Islamic art): a personal word processor containing
bibliographies, draft or completed studies, and dozens of special lists
adjusted to one's scholarly and personal concerns; dictionaries of a dozen
languages; immediate access to a complete index of all monuments of Islamic (or
other) art or relevant texts in one's field; a thesaurus of texts in Arabic
characters (let's say) indexed like the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae; an
access to the catalogue not only of the nearest scholarly library but of
hundreds of other research libraries; access to hundreds of bibliographic
databases through commercial sources such as DIALOG; a computer-assisted design
(CAD) program for architectural and urban investigations; some printers; one
screen available for whatever visitors bring; a machine to reconcile disks from
different sources; a modem-equipped telephone; and a fax machine. The cost of
this equipment may restrict its appearance to institutional offices and,
therefore, require a certain amount of sharing with others, as in most
scientific labs. At home, a lonely modem telephone would then keep company
with a portable computer used in the evening for war games.
The point of this exercise in simple-minded and currently expensive fantasy is
that the changes, novelties, and possibilities introduced into the surroundings
of the scholar in the humanities by electronic facilities affect much more than
one's scholarly output; they end up by shaping one's life, and, thus, probably,
modify the very nature of one's actual or potential knowledge. Is this a good
thing? Is it immaterial? Have we opened a Pandora's box of destructive and
harmful materials? How is one to deal with this invasion by technical
information and by machineries that in themselves have nothing to do with the
humanities? Is it possible that this new technology is not an unfortunate
invasion from other worlds but a creative novelty revealing the very structures
of humanistic knowledge and scholarship? Should one stop bemoaning a lost past
and assume that new and possibly different ways of seeing and understanding our
fields are about to emerge from the availability of new electronic
techniques?
For purposes of discussion, I shall offer comments and observations under four
categories: scholarship in the humanities; sources as resources; new horizons;
and the ways of practical existence in an academic life of humanistic thought.
Scholarship in the Humanities
I would like to propose four assumptions underlying scholarship in the
humanities.
First, there is the distinction between scholarship and learning, between a
savant and an érudit. All scholars are learned in the
sense that they possess large amounts of knowledge in many fields and subfields
and control several means of access (e.g., primarily languages in the
humanities, but also more specialized techniques like paleography, numismatics,
diplomatics, metrics, drafting) to further knowledge. The most common vanity
among humanists is to be able to provide information, factual or bibliographic,
in foreign languages if possible, straight out of one's head. But, if all
scholars are learned, not all learned people are scholars. A French historian
was once defined by a colleague with these scathing words: "Il sait tout, mais
il ne sait que ça." In a possibly more positive way, the story is told
of an English classicist being asked by a physicist colleague, "And what is new
in your field?" and responding, "Nothing, I hope." In short, there is an
expectation or a fear that knowledge must be supplemented with something
else.
This "something else" which makes a scholar out of a learned man is the
ability, shown regularly or only occasionally, to modify the character or the
quality of whatever one knows, to affect its understanding. Much discussion
can be devoted to defining these modifications. There is quality of
expression, as the ability to provide pleasure with information can be a
justification for reading opinionated and even inaccurate statements, as often
happens to those who read Michelet, Focillon, or Gibbon. There is
sophistication in judgment, as Gombrich or Riegl always enlighten, whatever
their topic, even if they are not fully informed about it. In short, next to
the establishment of texts, images, or facts, which is a technically important
activity of humanistic scholarship, there lie the evaluation of information and
the expression of that evaluation. Scholars are, in fact, divided between
those who see the establishment of a text (I obviously mean by that word more
than a written document) as the highest form of
scholarship[3]
and those who consider such philological pursuits as useful drudgeries, like
learning rules of grammar, that lead eventually to true scholarship.
A second assumption is that information in the humanities is largely finite and
mostly known. Individually, we are unaware of most local histories, artistic
developments, literatures, and religions, but we know that they exist, and it
is usually fair to say that people and facilities ready to handle any field of
learning are relatively easily available to anyone within the academic
system.[4]
Discoveries will no doubt be made, for instance by archaeologists, but it is
unlikely that a religion will appear that had not been known or suspected, that
many languages are yet to be discovered, that a newly revealed language will
elicit an unknown Bhagavad Gita, or that a major historical event will be
reconstructed from previously unknown documents or artifacts. The fate of most
of Raphael's paintings is known. In fact, it is essential to note how rarely
discoveries are made in the humanities that radically alter the knowledge or
understanding of anything. Exceptions like Lascaux or Ras Shamra (Ugarit)
notwithstanding, the real point is that totally unexpected finds like those of
Ebla, Panjikent, Khirbat al-Mafjar, Nag Hamadi, or the Dead Sea Scrolls have
added
footnotes,[5]
altered some edges in
knowledge (especially for the origins of already known phenomena like the
alphabet, the religious and social context of early Christianity, or Persian
painting), but did not fundamentally affect the processes of historical or
esthetic thought; at best these discoveries were seen as confirmations of known
theories and facts rather than as clear paths for new
understanding.[6]
It is, in short, fairly easy to argue that there are clear and known procedures
underlying the establishment of "facts" such as what happened at some time or
place, the text of a written work, the documentation from an archive, or the
visual data about a cathedral. Furthermore, most "facts" are known and
competent scholars know more or less where and how to find those which are
still unavailable or not established. From this cold-blooded fact-oriented
"scientistic" point of view, it is easy to argue that much more energy should
be devoted to Mongolian or Peruvian history and culture than to American
civilization, to the arts of India than to nineteenth century Europe, and so
on. For the ultimate objective of learning in the humanities is to establish
equally clearly all "facts" about everything done by and for men and women
everywhere.
Establishing facts is an integral part of training to enter any field of the
humanities. To make an edition or a new edition of a text or to establish the
catalogue (preferably raisonné) of an artist or of a collection are
worthy, perhaps even important goals. But most written or visual texts,
especially in Western civilization, are available in more or less acceptable
forms, and those which are not may well not deserve to
be.[7]
However, my third assumption is that a
humanist's glory is, most of the time, made not by the discovery or
establishment of a text, but by the interpretations and judgments of the text
already provided for him or her. These transformations are of two types. One
is restricted to a "text" or to a "fact," which becomes illuminated or whose
sense is extended much beyond itself, as happened, for instance, with Le
Roy-Ladurie's Montaillou or might have happened to Bakran's publication
of the foundation text of the Süleymaniye in Istanbul, if historians of
architecture and economic life read Turkish. The second type is theoretical
and independent of a "fact," as happens with Marxism, the so-called
Annales approach to history, structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, or
cognition. This host of attitudes, approaches, and judgments is at the core of
what makes the humanities exciting, and there can even be judgments that
illuminate or destroy a "fact." The celebrated study of Baudelaire's Les
Chats by R. Jakobson and C. Levi-Strauss nearly ruined for me both
structuralism and Baudelaire, while the reading of Stendhal's pages on the
cupolas of Rome is always a pleasure and Panofsky's article on Poussin's Et
ego in Arcadia has made me appreciate a painter toward whom I am usually
quite indifferent. The fascinating part of this judgmental or interpretative
aspect of humanistic scholarship--and something that distinguishes it quite
strongly from natural or physical sciences--is that it is nearly always
additive rather than cumulative. A new interpretation is simply added to
earlier ones; the more such alternative interpretations one provides, the more
scholarly the author and the richer the subject. At the extreme of Bakhtian
analyses, interpretations become an integral part of every
text.[8]
The last assumption about scholarship in the humanities is that it is a
solitary venture by individuals operating alone. There are exceptions, as in
much of archaeology, and during the process of working colleagues, students,
relatives, friends, and even enemies can play a technical role for information
or a more creative role as critics or as
foils.[9]
But, on the whole, the acquisition and use
of operating tools like languages, whatever cultural or other knowledge may be
necessary for any one study, and especially the final acts of writing or of
correcting one's writing, are all things one does alone. Scholarship does not
come out without organized or informal help (and to some of the elements in
this help I shall return), but the humanist-scholar's world is that of silent
libraries and collections beautifully run by diligent but quiet attendants and
of peaceful home studies lined with books and images.
Within this sketch of a humanist-scholar's life and activities, the role or
potential role of electronic information is as of now quite limited if the
accomplishments, expectations, and ideals of humanists remain more or less as
they are. There is, of course, the word processor, whose obvious benefits have
often been praised, but the important point about it is that, while it helped
immensely those who write easily, it did not help anyone write. At times, it
gave the illusion that it could, and my own informal and most unscientific as
well as probably unfair observation of its appearance on the academic scene was
that many of the first to acquire a word processor were students and colleagues
who could not write and hoped that the machine would help them. Beyond the
processor, one could imagine a series of programs called Marxism,
deconstruction, the new historicism, quality in French poetry, and esthetic
values in general, feed to them the "facts" of the French Revolution,
Hamlet, Verlaine's poetical oeuvre, or all of Manet, and come out
with every 'fact' provided with a seat number in the airplane of scholarly
judgment. Somehow I doubt that this will ever happen, but the reason is likely
to be its cost rather than the principle of the thing.
Matters are different in the one area of humanistic research where electronic
information has made its most consistent inroads and many permanent
modifications in the conditions of a scholar's work. It is the area of
"sources," that is to say of "facts" and often interpretations transformed into
anonymous information rather than the personalized contact with a
colleague.[10]
Sources as Resources
Forgetting for the moment the depressing possibility that no text is ever
perfectly known, it is easy enough to argue that the availability of "texts"
in easily accessible form is a good thing, that computers are excellent
instruments for gathering such facts and making them accessible according to an
almost infinite number of categories, and probably (although I am only quoting
from hearsay) that there will ultimately be a cost advantage in the nearly
total computerization of factual information like texts, images, library
holdings, technical or general vocabularies in all languages, and so on.
The financial projection, if true, is an important argument for the growth of
computerized information for two reasons. One is that computerized means such
as disks are cheap to reproduce (although not to produce) and, therefore, that
it will be possible to equip any new or deficient establishment with the
factual or textual opportunities of the richest institutions in the world.
Should one not, then, invest now in the expensive infrastructure needed to
receive the eventual invasion of disks with total knowledge? Electronic
information, far from being the privilege of the rich, like research libraries
or museums were and still are, could be a factor in the democratization of
knowledge. The other reason is that a collective agreement on a vision allows
for a relatively rational planning of resources in training and forming
students for tasks that can be clearly defined. Although the possibility of
altered visions and the apparently very rapidly achieved obsolescence of
expensive equipment may make this advantage somewhat dubious. One may end up
by training scholars for processes of knowledge rather than for knowledge
itself.
There are other problems with this idealized picture of a future that seems
just around the corner. I will mention two of them and then turn to a broader
philosophical question around what seems the most obvious use of electronic
information, how to make resources out of sources.
The first issue is that, while verbal texts are relatively easy to incorporate
into a program if they are in a language using an alphabet, matters are quite
different when one comes to images (and, I suppose, pictographs and ideographs,
although I have no knowledge of what has been done in these areas). Images can
be digitized and made visible (although at considerable cost so far), but, to
my knowledge at least, no program has as yet succeeded in recognizing sections
of images by concept or in using words to retrieve details of an image, like
recalling a "church" from the plan of a city or a "standing woman" from a
painting. In all likelihood, the problem is not so much technical as it is
intellectual. The phonetic (i.e., based on the smallest identifiable elements)
structure of images and even of architecture is so loose (or, in the case of
buildings, so meaningless) that it is nearly impossible to provide the computer
with a descriptive structure that would be coherent and useful, yet not
simple-minded. The various programs or projects that so far exist either end
up by dealing essentially with words and use images only as illustrations or
have bogged down in the intricacies of creating an elaborate thesaurus for
describing artifacts in several languages but without a usable retrieval
system. Some projects have done both.
The key point is that, whereas a technology exists to deal with numbers and
with alphabets, and therefore with anything that can be turned easily into
numbers and letters, the technology of computerizing images that exists for
satellite photography or the recording of bodily behavior in medicine, has not
been, to my knowledge at least, successfully transferred to currently existing
man-made images or
artifacts.[11]
I will suggest later that there may be a way out of this difficulty, but
it requires us to modify significantly the way we think about images.
The second issue concerns the most successful computerization activity
affecting scholarship in the humanities; that is to say, the revolution in
libraries and library-related activities. I do not mean only the catalogues of
holdings and the various accesses to shelf lists and circulation files. I mean
also indexed compilations of texts like the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the
huge bibliographical services made available through electronic repositories
like DIALOG or FRANCIS and through specialized ones like MLA Bibliography
or
America: History and Life.[12]
For we are in fact facing a level of possible servicing by libraries that is
far beyond anything known since the disappearance of the specialized learned
conservator and reader of books. Whole staffs are now ready to help
with searches in most areas requested by customers. They usually prefer to do
the search themselves, largely, I am told, because the cost of searches
requires professional training in order to avoid waste.
It is difficult to quarrel with the computerized catalogue of a library, and
such quarreling as I would muster is probably based on the awkwardness of my
own use of the computer catalogue, such as with errors in typing titles, or
the difficulty of browsing through the computer catalogues of most
research-oriented institutions. However, the implications of this for
scholarship are that it puts control over resources into the hands of
technicians who cannot possibly know or understand the subtleties necessary to
the successful accomplishment of their tasks. They are too few in numbers,
insufficiently rewarded, and trained in the mistaken assumption that titles or
indices tell everything there is to know about a book or an article, when a
most important and unexpected reasoning appears in an obscure footnote and when
a judgment on the quality of an article is essential to its appropriate use by
anyone. Publishers or registrars in graduate schools have been told to frown
on poetic or fancy titles as misleading and, therefore, difficult to
encapsulate into an appropriate spot within a data bank, because the point of
an entry is to say what a published work is about without having to read it.
An example: As I was writing a small piece on a thirteenth century Arabic
manuscript of Dioscorides' Materia Medica, I wanted to be sure that I
had not missed some recent bibliographical item. I availed myself of the
services of my library for a search for items on Dioscorides published since
1980. Some 220 turned up on the list given by the computer, including 180
items before 1700 because the list included every Dioscorides card computerized
in American libraries since 1980. Only two of the 220 items dealt with
scholarly work on medieval manuscripts after 1980. Whether the problem lay
with my mis-communication or with the librarian's technique, the experiment
was wasteful and a failure.
The same problems exist for the inputting of information. In the catalogue of
a recent huge exhibition held in Berlin in 1989, the impressive bibliography of
thousands of items includes one author named Grabar, Oleg-André. Some
computer or user had simply conflated me with my father into a single,
long-lived, and very prolific scholar. Clearly no one had bothered to look at
any of the items listed. It is true, of course, that, in older times as well,
bibliographical lists did not mean that items on them were read, but they were
not misleading, as could happen with the Berlin catalogue because of
insufficient controls over those who make up the lists.
As a bit of sheer nostalgia, I will mention that the distinguished humanist
scholar Ernst Herzfeld, knowing that several of his books would appear after
his death, asked that they not be provided with indices. Politeness, he
argued, requires that books be read for learning and pleasure in their entirety
and not browsed through for specific information or for inclusion in a
footnote.
Bibliographical surveys raise even more problems. None of them is complete; and
usually it is the rarer language and areas which have been eliminated or
overlooked, thereby strengthening the Western-centeredness of scholarly
knowledge and further marginalizing a large percentage of mankind. This very
traditional and inflexible organization of the material makes anything but the
most conservative research difficult. Thus, the manual for a data bank on
biographies of artists sponsored by the Comité International d'Histoire
de l'Art (CIHA, June 1989) argues correctly (p. 36) that "choices must rest
first of all on the problem-setting (problématique) of the
History of Art." But it ends with proposals of the utmost specificity and with
a primary focus on the clarity of the texts summarizing the lives and
works of artists--in other words, with a written text simply transmitted by
electronic means.
The implication of these observations is a simple one. There is one area in
which electronic transformation has not merely taken place but is a reasonable
thing, perhaps even a good one, because its qualities of precision and the
rapidity of its reactions to requests are progressive attributes that improve
one's work. The area is that of sources and of facts transformed into
resources and into artifacts: that is to say, into active components of the
scholarly enterprise. The question is whether society, funding agencies, and
administrations of all sorts are willing to spend the large sums necessary for
the successful completion of a grand, universal data bank of information and
then for its operation by competent, that is to say expensive, hands. The
dangers of marginalization on the one hand and of dysfunctional use on the
other may render whatever is created both useless and immoral.
But, since there is no way for all facts and all sources to be
processed, we are faced with a frightening question, curiously enough the
question which lurks behind so much of public life in the late twentieth
century: who or what body is to decide what to include, what to exclude, and
how to put it in, always recalling that the matter is not as simple as copying
Greek texts into a new medium of transmission and training a machine to
recognize certain combinations of numbers, letters, or forms. It is also a
matter of putting in an infinite number of images, writings in nearly a dozen
different alphabets, a million potsherds excavated every year, and some forty
languages of scholarly discourse. With computerization, there is no return to
"manual" except on a very limited scale. Should one make a list of needed
items in some sort of pecking order? Are professional scholars to be involved
in making such lists or are they the responsibility of civil authorities? Are
problems to be handled in court? Are there boundaries in the uses for
electronic information between necessary and optional items? Can one draw
up a charter of rights of texts or opinions? Should one do so?
Let me push my argument a step further. A system that allows for easy
recognition of words, expressions, quotations, and other details in written
texts and, eventually, in images or in nature is a system which violates the
conceptual, aesthetic, and stylistic unity of a text, of an image, or of an
environment. It is useful to know whether a given word exists in Plato
or whether Dickens quotes from the Bible, but the same mechanisms of
availability cannot (or should not?) be used to read a whole Platonic dialogue
or an entire nineteenth century novel. Yet it is the latter which is truly
important, while the former is but a convenience. Or is it not, perhaps, that
in our time texts are only sources for excerpts, manuals, and anthologies? The
cuts are made by known or anonymous professionals, but it is easy to imagine
that, just as with the rights to choice, in giving life, to die with dignity,
to enjoy the amenities of life in spite of handicaps, in fact even the
opportunity (if it is one) to become a nation-state, these decisions will
become the privilege of deans, trustees, judges, lawyers, United Nations
officials, doctors and priests, all remote decision-makers invented by
contemporary management practices.
These questions clearly need further discussion. They exemplify, to my mind, a
central and very humanistic dilemma: to move ahead before learning how to
drive or to do nothing by being unable to decide what to do. The many examples
of both tendencies from the past ten years explain the enduring (and endearing)
frustration of a humanist's life.
New Horizons
Even my own limited experience has brought me in contact with areas where
computer-based activities in the humanities have been creative, and in
unsuspected ways.
The first one derives from a CAD project designing the early medieval city of
Jerusalem from a mix of archaeological and written documents. The project is
not yet complete, but it already exhibits some of the features expected of that
type of program: near infinity of points of view for a single drawing, views
of the city from unexpected places, and so on. In two instances, it led us
beyond the expected. One is technical. For the drawing of the Holy Sepulchre,
we used the standard most recent reconstruction proposed by the most competent
scholar of the matter in a typical axonometric bird's-eye drawing. Once the
computer tilted this drawing to show the building as it would have appeared
from the street rather than from the point of view of angels above it (as in
the traditional drawing of a scholar), the Holy Sepulchre appeared as a rather
silly-looking silo behind a church. Did it really look like that? Is our
contemporary judgment of adequate proportions wrong? Should we change the
drawing simply because we don't like the result?
In a related instance, by introducing into the drawing of a mosque a personage
praying and then looking around himself, we were able to explain a hitherto
meaningless architectural modification to the structure of the building. In
this example, the computer was not necessary to explain a puzzle, but it
helped. The point is that the computer's flexibility and the manipulations of
the completed architectural drawing allowed a much wider range of possible
views (in this case, views of a work of architecture or of a whole city) than
in conventional ways. At their creative best, computers can provide unexpected
alternatives, which enlarge understanding--thus compelling new questioning of
sources or more elaborate operations for imaginative understanding.
As one transfers information or draws images on a computer, the computer begins
to ask questions about whatever you feed into it, and answers have to be
provided before one can proceed. This important point was made by Marilyn
Aronberg Lavin as she dealt with narrative frescoes in Italian
churches:[13]
Walls which can be just a line on a
two-dimensional plan must be given a height in a three-dimensional drawing.
Often the height is not known, and the scholar is compelled to invent (or
hypothesize). The invention will become truth unless contradicted by some
other evidence, which means that what originated as a mere suggestion will be
perpetuated as accurate. Like the drawings of the National Geographic
(and of many similar publications at the edges between restricted
scholarship and popular culture), these reconstructed buildings and towns or
the interpretation of stories on the walls of Italian churches become thought
of as facts when some of them are only judgments. The intellectual
implications of these examples are fundamental: A cardinal rule of humanistic
scholarship has been broken, as fact and fancy are no longer separate, even if
the latter is plausible.
Yet it is possible to argue quite differently from these examples. For another
creative contribution from the computer is to have brought into sharp focus an
aspect of scholarly thinking that has not been highlighted as clearly in the
humanities as in the
sciences.[14]
Between facts and interpretations there lies an intermediary zone, somewhat
akin to
DOS, which has nothing to do with either fact or interpretation, although it
partakes of both, but without which neither is possible. In a forthcoming
book, I shall argue for the existence of this intermediary zone in the visual
arts.[15]
It is a zone of technical (stone
or brick), affective (I like or dislike something), intellectual (I know or
don't know), emotional (red makes me cry), or esthetic (it is beautiful)
intermediaries or mediators that are necessary means of access to all works of
art. But I wonder whether such mediating features are not necessarily present
in the understanding of text-based arts as well and in the comprehension of any
historical moment or event. For it is these intermediaries which transform
facts and interpretation into information; they make them accessible to a
variety of users. The puritanism of humanistic research and of modernist
aesthetics had hidden that intermediary as something shameful like ornament on
buildings, but the computer, by asking simultaneously about the process of
seeing, the process of creating, and the product or the scope of the
data provided, may well have brought to light a hitherto hidden but essential
mechanism of scholarship. In this instance, electronic means compel a field of
intellectual activities that neither sought nor needed those means to shed its
reluctance to think and talk about itself.
The third "new horizon" is in education. Several electronic programs exist
commercially (or will soon exist) that are not of significant use to the
scholar in any one field, but that are meant to introduce a student or a layman
to classical Greece (the Perseus Project), to the writing of English, or to
other subfields in the humanities. Because these programs are not designed to
help research, they are not the primary concern of this gathering. We may,
however, wish to ponder them for two reasons. First, within one generation
much of the information acquired by students and the scholars of the future
will probably come through the manipulation of educational programs instead of
(in addition to?) the traditional reading of books. The second is that, in the
instance of visual information, the computer has truly unique advantages over
earlier means of information. Both reasons require short comments.
I shall be particularly brief on the first issue, as my own experience with
Perseus and with a highly sophisticated program like The Census of Antique Art
and Architecture Known to the Renaissance led me to two contradictory
conclusions. On the one hand, I was impressed by the intelligence and quality
of the programs, but on the other I could not think of anything but contrived
questions to ask of them (or else I knew in what book or article in my own
library to look for answers to my questions or directions for further work).
The point may be important precisely because these programs do not deal with
topics of scholarly concern to me, but with that peculiar area of knowledge
that lies somewhere between scholarship and a general culture whose definition
would require another paper. But, then, my reaction as a professional scholar
is probably not very useful, and I would urge thorough user surveys of existing
programs before funds are invested in new ones. Enough programs of different
kinds exist to justify an in-depth analysis of usefulness carried out by
several different user groups ranging from financial sponsors to
administrators, teachers, and students from varying types of institutions.
Finally, electronic information is unique in its potential for revealing
"facts" and interpretations with a spatial context like all of architecture,
a spatial connotation as in an opera or a play, or in nearly all aspects of
religious liturgies or of pious behavior. No sequence of photographs and no
book can provide as well as electronic means the immediate presence of a work
of architecture or of anything connected with architecture like the sculpture
of a Hindu temple, the paintings of the Sistine Chapel, of a performance on a
stage, or of the intensity of the pilgrimage to Mekka. Education can be
revolutionized by bringing the Taj Mahal into the classroom, into any public
library, or into one's study. The cost of doing it well may be staggering,
especially if one weighs in the ethical issues of what would be excluded from a
real visual survey of a significant part of the arts of mankind. But it may
well be worth considering, for, like the genetic map being proposed by
biologists, what would be provided is truly revolutionary and profoundly
democratic and egalitarian: to make available in any classroom or study the
fullness of experiences restricted so far to the rich or to those imaginative
enough to translate what they read into images.
Learned studies will follow like so many appendices; scholarship of a more
traditional kind should perhaps wait until the effects of this availability are
better known. Although this last point goes against the tradition of free
choice in scholarly endeavor, it may just be that electronic information will
lead to a new kind of historical scholarship based on the needs of today's
users rather than on the demands of the past. In a curious way which I do not
entirely understand, while traditional scholarship searched for authors in the
arts and causes or contexts in history, and while a "modern" or "new"
scholarship focused on specific events or individual works of art, the
scholarship induced by electronic means may end up by being centered on the
ever-shifting receiver and user of
information.[16]
In short, I am arguing that the educational potential of electronic means seems
to me far greater than its potential for scholarship, at least in the
humanities. Education is understood as a complex procedure of acquiring a
culture and a knowledge, not as technical training. This possible educational
revolution might in turn lead to a new scholarship, for the scholar in the
humanities may well become less the weaver of culture than the processor of
information. The danger is that he may end up by controlling what is
available.
Scholarly Existence in a New Electronic Era
The popular press has begun to worry about such disabilities as may arise from
too much sitting in front of screens, aching backs, swollen fingers, damaged
eyes. But my aim in this section is not medically concrete, for the practice
of electronically transmitted data has already created and will further develop
habits of intellectual and professional life which will in turn affect
scholarship as we now know it. I will mention only two points.
One is that the cost of the necessary equipment on the one hand and the
existence of functions like E-mail on the other one modify the status of the
researcher. He or she is less solitary, more dependent on institutional
support, more in need of all sorts of technical services or else forced to
acquire dozens of ancillary skills which take him or her away from working in
areas of unique competence, more accessible and vulnerable to the
intrusion by others (friendly or not), and less clear on the expectations made
of him or her for the rewards of the academic system. It seems difficult to
imagine that traditional learned articles and elegant books will emerge from
the frenzy of adjusting to new programs and the investment in expensive
software. Reading, the mainstay of humanistic knowledge, will no longer roam
over the endless shelves of public or private libraries, but will concentrate
on the needs of the moment. A certain kind of literate culture may well
disappear and perhaps with it something of the imaginative creativity which fed
the humanities for the past century.
The humanities are always vulnerable to the criticism of prejudice, because
quality is less firmly identified with measurable achievements. As the
activities of the scholar turn more and more to an area where everything is
measured, from the time spent looking at a screen to the bytes logged in, the
minutes spent on the telephone, or the data perused, the evaluation of quality
and originality will become more difficult and the ways to reward either
mechanized or arbitrary. Altogether a new kind of work ethic will probably
evolve. Its rules are unclear, but they are not those of the past.
An even more important aspect of this new era lies in a new intellectual ethic.
Scholarship in the humanities will be able to maintain its universal potential,
its assumption of ubiquitous validity, and its availability for all fields only
if the data available is either universal itself (the preferred solution) or
has clearly proclaimed limits. The issue here is one of investment, but is it
proper, legitimate, and worthwhile to invest partially? The transformation of
the humanities by electronic means may only be worth accomplishing if it is
done on a grand scale and fairly rapidly, and if it involves deprived countries
and institutions as well as well-heeled institutions at the forefront of
knowledge. The gap that technology has created between haves and have-nots in
the sciences need not be repeated in the humanities, because the humanities
depend much less on technology. But it will take place if techniques that can
bridge these gaps are used to increase them by remaining even more
Western-oriented than they were before. Thought should be given to the ways of
avoiding these results. But, in the meantime, the fear remains that
scholarship in the humanities will be absorbed in education. This may be a
short-term gain, but is, without doubt, a long-term tragedy.
My concluding remarks are two. One is that the educational (in the broadest
sense) possibilities of electronic devices seem to me much greater than the
intellectual ones, as no new scholarship has yet emerged to replace the
traditional one and the new possibilities have only occasionally led to
unexpected and fruitful results. My argument is that this may be so because
the most interesting and most creative aspect of electronic information is that
it has opened up what I called the mediatory side of knowledge. It did not
invent it, but made it more visible. And we must await the passing of half a
generation before novelties enter into the humanistic mainstream. An
intellectual potential exists, which may, however, be preempted by the more
immediate and more rewarding educational potential.
Second, it is possible to argue that one key problem dominates both
accomplishments and projects. As choices have to be made between information
to include or to exclude, languages to use or to forget, audiences to target or
to abandon, ways of evaluation and judgments to develop, degrees of
universalism, and so on, no mechanism exists about how these choices are to be
made. Should cost dominate the decision-making process? Or need? And whose
need? Should users predominate in making decisions? Or wise Grand
Inquisitors?
Footnotes
[1] To convince oneself, it is enough
to wonder how often one is likely to do what so many accessory manuals to word
processing manuals teach one to do. And I still remember how, once curiosity
had led me to push buttons whose meaning I could not understand from the
manuals, a learned article, fortunately a short one, was transformed into
several pages of Christmas trees.
[2] A "scientistic" attitude is probably the product of the
second half of the nineteenth century. Its key assumption is that there is
a truth whose discovery is possible through the artful and thorough
knowledge of original sources and through the critical evaluation of past
scholarship everywhere. The objective of every savant or
gelehrte is to accumulate as much information as possible in order to
establish these truths. Once established, the truths are final, at least until
replaced by new ones reached according to the same criteria.
[3] A colleague argued many years back that to change one
word in the Greek text of a Platonic dialogue was the ultimate achievement for
a Hellenist.
[4] The picture is somewhat idealized in this paragraph, but
I do believe that total and equal coverage of all knowledge about mankind was
the goal of research universities and other comparable institutes issued out of
the European Enlightenment. Whether anyone still believes in this ideal is
another story. Yet it has affected the prevalent thinking about research and
scholarship in the humanities.
[5] I am limiting myself to the area of western Asia with
which I have some familiarity; others would make different lists. An informal
experiment of asking distinguished colleagues in traditional fields of the
humanities whether they could name a single "discovery" that would have altered
the direction of the field failed to elicit a single example. It is true, of
course, that all could identify some fact established by scholarship which
would have been irretrievably modified. All instances seemed secondary to me
as an outsider to their fields.
[6] The examples I have given are mostly of archaeologically
retrieved information, because archaeology always leads to new information.
One can discover new data in archives or new texts in manuscript collections,
but the collections or archives are already available, unless closed for
political or managerial reasons. Access to them is also relatively cheap,
whereas archaeology is relatively expensive. At the same time, the setting up
and maintenance of archives, like the preservation of monuments and of
environments, are costly affairs. Some debate has begun on the
cost-effectiveness of preservation, but, as so often is the case, financial and
budgetary decisions have preceded thinking about the issues.
[7] There lie behind this statement two interesting issues.
One is ethical. "Texts" (written or visual, even eventful) by women and
"others" were no doubt neglected and, thus, made inaccessible for generations.
Such conscious or unconscious prejudices thus justify the continuing uncovering
of hitherto unknown "texts," regardless of their apparent worthiness or lack
thereof. Does this mean that all unavailable texts should be made
accessible, leaving the decision of whether and how to handle them to users who
did not participate in the choices? The other issue is a practical one. Some
argue that no text is ever fully established, neither what happened on July 14,
1789, nor what Shakespeare wrote or Rembrandt painted. Every text is always in
an asymptotic state, striking for an unreachable perfection, but the point may
only matter if texts have rights, as some have recently argued about works of
architecture and of other cultural artifacts. Although ultimately important
for the purposes of this paper, the nature of a text or of an event cannot be
discussed more fully at this juncture.
[8] Although Mikhail Bakhtin is the critic who developed
these thoughts, their independently achieved demonstration has been most
successful in movies and short stories by Woody Allen.
[9] It is easy for an older scholar like myself to argue that
the recent habit of younger scholars to thank so many people even when writing
a short article is a sign of decadence in humanist behavior. For, among other
attributes, a humanist is defined by the ability to have opinions and the
willingness to defend them.
[10] There is another interesting philosophical issue here
which is that, in order to be useful to anyone, knowledge or data, even ideas,
must be transformed into information. When restricted by language, the most
brilliant thoughts or the most important facts simply do not exist. Does it
matter? Furthermore, it would be interesting to know whether scholars do not
acquire most of their information through the informal network of friends and
colleagues (the locker-room syndrome) rather than through formal means. In
fact you have "arrived" when you no longer have to use a bibliography.
[11] A comparable failure exists with respect to the images
and our reaction to them that characterize daily life. Programs exist to help
us with banking needs, but not with interior decorating or gardening, nor with
our judgment of people on the basis of the color or shape of their clothes.
For in all these examples we make immediate judgments without retrieving or
recalling the information on which the judgments were based.
[12] I should add that I am not familiar with these specific
programs and that I have always been critical of the Western-centeredness of
bibliographies, computerized or not, in my own fields.
[13] Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, The Place of Narrative:
Mural Decoration in Italian Churches 431-1600 (Chicago, 1990), esp. pp.
261-263.
[14] See, for instance, Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins
of Scientific Thought (Cambridge, 1973), esp. pp. 36 and 57-58. Other
historians of science and of culture made comparable points, like Thomas Kuhn
and his paradigms, and, on a broader philosophical basis, Michel Foucault's
idea of an épistemé is related.
[15] Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament
(Princeton, 1992), forthcoming.
[16] If true, this point would be an interesting
justification for the Rezeptiontheorie in the arts which is so popular
in contemporary German criticism.
