Thank you all for coming.
As someone who seldom turns out to lectures by others, I can greatly appreciate the trouble and the meaning of your turning up here, so thank you.
It would be presumptuous of me in the extreme to connect the period since the inception of digital computing about 70 years ago,
about as long as I've been around with the Enlightenment.
But for the fact that apart from the noise and clutter that computing is has caused in spite of the deeply sinister uses to which it has been put,
the central question it raises is the question of reason.
What do we need to consider as scholars when we use computing to reason about our objects of study?
How are its implementations of computing that we inherit and make ourselves changing what we do?
Those are big questions I will sniff around the edges of.
Now that leads me to to the Japanese print here to let you know what I will be.
What you can expect from me. This tale the the hand of your son.
Forgive the terrible Japanese pronunciation. In the version told by the roboticist Masahiro Mori,
an old couple acquire a dog who runs into their garden, sniffing the ground stops and barks insistently.
Dig here, dig here. The old man digs and finds a hoard of gold coins.
Mori very self-deprecating. Li says. I'm that dog.
I don't do any digging. I just run around and find interesting things and bark a lot.
I'm not so self-deprecating.
I mean it when I see that that's what I do is run through the field and bark what I find interesting stuff and that's what I'm going to do tonight.
So profundity is perhaps not, but I hope you will be inspired by some of this to do some digging yourself.
You will I am guessing you have heard of the literary historian Franco Moretti's term distant reading,
by which he means the use of computational methods to find patterns in large bodies of text large textual corpora.
In the epigraph to his first discussion of it,
Moretti quotes Aaron's words from the libretto to Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished and quite unorthodox opera Moses and Aaron.
This is what Aaron says. My mission to see it more simply than I understand it.
So what Moretti is doing here is striking in an implicit analogy, on the one hand,
to humanly comprehensible simplifications of the transcendent Aaron's Golden Calf and computational results,
on the other hand, to rich complexities beyond comprehension.
The idea of the divine and the whole of literature between them is the Negotiator Liben.
It saw the relationship somewhat differently, not an external drama, but the ongoing internal negotiation within a happy marriage.
Joining theoreticians and empiric this relationship between the dirt and the word.
As Emily firmly said, once of archaeology and philology is where the promise of digital computing lies.
My aim here is to question and explore that promise.
To my mind, the negotiating in that metaphor is central.
It shifts attention from the fact that computing and the humanities have intersected
to the actions we take in that intersection loudness as metaphor of negotiation.
The Félix Connubial is a provocative one for in a relationship of that kind.
Each partner affects the other and is in turn affected in a manner of speaking the CoreValve.
So also the developmental spiral in the history of technology, from invention to assimilation to new invention.
The traffic between scholarship and computing is usually conceived and followed as if it were a one way street there that we must change.
Perhaps it was labelmates or perhaps Voltaire, who was the last in the West to be capable of truly encyclopaedic knowledge in that sense, at least.
This lecture sits well under both their names. Undoubtedly,
the many specialisms into which the whole range of their concerns have branched and branched again and again are affected by the digital machine.
But I want to argue for more than that for the encyclopaedic relevance of digital computing and scholarship to each other.
And particularly because it is so undervalued by experts on both sides,
computing's need for the rich inheritance and ongoing work of our literally human resources.
I want someone to invite to entice as many bearers of green from as many academic silos as possible,
including those silos that have been around for a long,
long before digital computing was invented, so that our understanding of how to use it does not suffer from starvation of the mind and spirit.
In a nutshell, this understanding shows us that the machine is not just an obedient servant to our whims,
thoughts and questions by its resistance to us, as well as by its enabling amplification of our imaginative capacities.
It has the potential of becoming a powerful companion with which to reason to question.
And perhaps someday to converse. Allow me to enlarge the point if the computer were only a platform for useful applications.
Acknowledged Jukebox, a filing system, a communications platform, digital typewriter and the like.
Then there would be much less for me to talk about.
In fact, I wouldn't be here as ubiquitous and central to our work as these applications are as much as they affect us.
They aren't my subject,
nor are the genuine accomplishments of digital scholarship brilliantly summarised by a Laura Mandel three weeks ago in a blog post.
Experiencing the bust. Responding to a polemical rant in the American Chronicle of Higher Education,
I won't repeat her insightful defence or add to her list of worthy studies, which are indeed growing in number and easy to find.
As long as you know where to look and can separate the wheat from the chaff.
Later on, we return to use of the machine for straightforward access to stuff,
but throughout my lecture, my emphasis will be on the enlightening cognitive resistance.
I just spoke of. And that kind of problematic liberation inherent to the machine from its beginnings.
And I want to persuade you that the very,
that very quickly such enquiry leads to the deep end in which the older disciplines have been from their beginnings,
have been swimming and teaching others to swim. But since Professor Cronk invited me here,
I must at least begin with a class of examples relevant to the Voltaire Foundation's ambitious editorial project.
In his essay, Editing is a theoretical pursuit. Jerome again cites a number of remarkable scholarly editions emergent as he says,
under a digital horizon, prophesying an electronic existence for themselves.
That's the way Jerry writes.
These courtesies, he continues, comprise our ages in cannabis books and winding sheets rather than swaddling clothes at once.
Very beautiful and very ugly, fascinating and tedious.
These books drive the resources of the codex to its limits and beyond.
Hence, the urgent dream of the Digital Edition with its many tie encoded approximations.
I don't certainly don't want to belittle or seem arrogantly to correct the industry of scholarship producing these editions.
Rather, I want to talk about this industry's theoretical pursuit from a theoretical
perspective relevant to all the disciplines of the arts and letters for which,
by the way, I've co-opted the term literally human resources from the Oxford Classics programme.
Again, my subject is the potential of the digital medium to respond to the emergent demands not only of the critical edition,
but also all other scholarly terms forms of expression.
The critic I.a Richards, who helped establish English literary criticism, various literary studies at Cambridge,
began his book Principles of Literary Criticism, with the assertion that a book is a machine to think with.
Richards compared his book to a loom.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Jack Card's machine, whose control mechanisms Charles Babbage adopted for his analytical engine in 1836.
With the digital edition in mind, I want to put you in mind of how the design of any such machine to think with from cuneiform
tablets and papyrus rolls of Alexandria to the paperback shapes the thinkers cognitive paths.
Consider these six examples.
The first is a 19th century glossed manuscript of Marciano's Capellas Late Antique Work Day, new piece on the marriage of philology and Mercury,
in which the glosses weave together traditional authorities and commentary with the fifth century text glosses here not only clarify,
sometimes they obscure by encryption, wordplay, puzzles,
allegories and etymology is paradoxically revealing by concealing the reader's path is often purposefully an intricate maze.
The second one in the middle. Top middle is a verbal concordance, a 13, 12th or 13th 14th century manuscript, I think it says.
But the concordance itself was invented in the late 12th or early 13th century.
This research tool is there, and Krauss would say, directs the enquiring mind from a given word, from a given head word,
which you can see illuminated in those columns to all of the passages in the wall
gate where it is attested reading is to some degree randomised as well as directed.
The third example is a 20th century but solidly traditional English Bible, published by Oxford University Press,
whose central column links passages both within each testament and between them,
not by the words they use, but according to the topological structure.
They illuminate under the principle articulated by Saint Augustine for the Christian Bible in the old, he wrote.
The new is concealed and in the new, the old is revealed.
The fourth example of lower left is a computer generated keyword in context or quick concordance,
whose format for stalls reading redirecting attention to the centred word to its nearest neighbours.
Left and right. It is the basis for the field of of corpus linguistics, according to linguist Firth's dictum.
You shall know a word by the company it keeps or is your mother would have said to you in your
childhood if she had spoken Latin NASCAR to or a silky is the fifth example in the middle.
A lower is Ramon Yarl's 14th century paper machine, designed to engage the reader combinatorial in correlating the terms of a spiritual logic.
And the last is one of Herman Goldstein's and John Fund Newman's diagrams to indicate the logical
flow of automated reasoning during the operation of a stored programme digital computer,
which they were designing at that time. More about that later.
And my point is phenomenological and applies. I will dare to say to the whole history of verbal communication that the media mediates.
That tool shaped the thoughts and actions of the person using them and themselves embody what philosopher Davis Baird has called thing knowledge.
The question for me is how the thing knowledge of the digital machine does this differently.
The best way to prise open my topic is with the concept and practise of what is called modelling.
That is the iterative manipulation of a software model.
This is where computing, as we know it begins with a digital representation of whatever it is to be manipulated.
There are two kinds of model, something in order to develop a model of something in order to develop one's understanding
of it and a model for something imagined or known only from surviving evidence,
either kind is unnecessarily simplified construct according to the machine's
rigorous constraints of discrete all or nothing binary logic ones and zeros,
as we say. What's important is that the model renders the real or imagined object of interest computationally tractable.
That is, it represents the object in a completely explicit and absolutely consistent manner.
These startlingly harsh axioms of digitisation, as I call them, have crucial implications I will return to in a moment.
Modelling is thus not strictly mimetic of an object in the real world, nor an imagined one,
because both require translation into binary terms and choice of what is to be included.
Hence rigorous compromise in return for such sacrifices of truth.
The model receives enormous combinatorial, manipulative power over the modelled object or idea.
Thus, the essential tension of the digital trade off between memetic fidelity and computational manipulative bility.
Now, let's first consider the analytic kind modelling of something more closely.
It's illustrated here I will return to the second synthetic kind later for modelling
of note in the slide the progressive circularity of represent of experiencing,
simplifying, building, manipulating and comparing with improved understanding of the modelled object and of the resultant process.
But consider what happens during the translation in the slide.
Note what the modeller has to work with what he is constrained to leave out how much he is imagining.
Let me give you three illustrative examples in the form of thought experiments.
One. Art historical into literary. Consider these eight paintings on the story of Icarus painted from the 16th, the 21st century.
The titles tell us they are about Icarus and in some cases, more than others.
So the visual clues from a strictly computational point of view.
The problem is deriving a rigorous set of criteria by which an algorithm could discover all these paintings without the help of their titles,
or if it had those titles, how it could qualify their variations on the theme, as Marina Werner wrote in the latest London review of books.
When the facts are missing, we tell stories. The machine works only from the facts.
We tell the stories. Second. Are two chapters from Barbara Kingsolver is wonderful novel The Poison Wood Bible.
Here we have a novel about an American family taken to what was then the Belgian Congo by their evangelical father, a fiery Baptist.
Each chapter is narrated by a member of the family. The narrator's name is the title, except for the last chapter, which has no title.
We can figure out with some work that the narrator is the dead child, Ruth May.
Or rather, is the being to whom she reverted when she died the to who is nameless and all seeing encompassing all people born, unborn and dead.
The problem is how to follow that inference algorithmically, not to the name Ruth Mae,
which would be totally false, but to the Moon to whom Ruth may once instantiated.
The problem is that the nameless narrator cannot be named.
Next is this wonderful poem by Seamus Heaney. I won't read it.
I'll let him do that. The railway children, when we climbed the slopes of the cutting,
we were eye level with the white cops of the telegraph poles and the sizzling
wires like lovely freehand they curved for miles east and miles west beyond us,
sagging under their burden of swallows. We were small and thought we knew nothing worth knowing.
We thought words travelled the wires in the shiny pouches of raindrops, each one seeded full with the light of the sky,
the gleam of the lines and ourselves so infinitesimally scaled we could stream through the eye of a needle.
Now, the problem I want to direct your attention to here is the last six words.
Which, as you probably know immediately, is an allusion to the parable of the rich man in the Synoptic Gospels.
But consider what it means to identify that illusion as opposed to leaving it be.
Leaving it suspended to leaving it something, you know, but is not said.
That's the difference I'm trying to get to in all three cases, we are left with a return to the drawing board and a number of questions.
These spur us to ask first, how do we know what we know?
Then to talk to a programmer or to ourselves as programmer even better about how a better response might be implemented.
But let me return to the crucial implications of the requirement for computational tractability, as I've called it,
the requirement that real world objects be rendered in a completely explicit and absolutely consistent manner.
Clearly, however, much pain is entailed by fitting a poem or other work of art into such a pro crusty embed.
We know how to do it. We know that the act of translation into discrete all or nothing terms illuminates by identifying the untranslatable.
We know that once that translation is done, the machine has absolutely no problem crunching the bits.
But how about the problem the interpreter has when he or she attempts to re translate the result back into human terms?
That, to my mind, is the nub of the matter.
Again, the negotiation for modelling of this is indeed the central and most difficult question for help with it.
I turn to historian of science David Goodling's work on the ways in which an experiment bitter construed as,
he says, new knowledge of the world from the behaviour of his experimental apparatus.
Here's my version of his diagram in which the artefact of study.
Is translated in a reductive fashion of absolute consistency and complete explicitness into a model in a programme,
then some stuff happens in the black box.
More about that black box in a moment and then is expanded back into the human context by means of these controls or,
as he says, the flexible quasi linguistic messengers between the perceptual and the conceptual.
Brilliant work. Gooding drew his theory of construal from a lifelong study of the 19th century scientist Michael
Faraday's meticulously detailed laboratory notebooks attempting to recreate what Faraday did.
Gooding focus specifically on that re translation from the controlled environment
of the experimental situation to the human world of the experimenter.
This took him into the phenomenological psychological,
cognitive and sensuous processes of negotiation by which the experimenter draws on what he called construal,
as I said, to form into provisional scientific knowledge.
I'm strongly inclined to think that Gooding theory maps very well onto what happens when we engage in modelling of a textual corpus,
a painting, a musical idea and so forth to make sense of them.
But much more work is required of us. We need the equivalent of Faraday's laboratory notebooks for research done with computing in the humanities.
We need to marshal the work of many decades on human computer interaction, especially in its in its attention to performance computing as theatre.
To quote Brenda Laurel, we need to think about what it means to treat computational work in the humanities,
analogously to experimental work in the laboratory sciences and so pay particular attention to the cognitive psychological aspects of work.
By Gooding. Ryan T. Nancy in recession and others, many others phenomenology should come into play.
If we do all that, we will be far better equipped to design a real digital critical edition.
Allow me to put to one side my ignorance and naivete as an amateur in these fields.
Literally a lover of what they do, but no specialist to insist on one thing that we never let slip from sight.
Those axioms of digitisation, the absolute consistency and complete explicitness of digital representation.
Some would say, and in fact do say that the genius of the digital is that renders digital superfluous.
As it is when we listen to a digitally recorded music that some of us can't hear that it's digital.
For research, I think Aiden Evans in his recent book, The Logic of the Digital is basically right that the discrete all or nothing quality of the
digital runs all the way from hardware circuitry to the user interface into the resources we use.
I conclude that to ignore the digital ity of the digital is to obscure the foil against which
our reasoning struggles and is perhaps transformed when we do the kind of work I am describing.
There's a very big question here that I haven't thought about nearly enough about to face in public directly.
Namely, reasonings changes in prolonged exposure to the machine.
But I will dare to guess that there are four aspects of computing's influence to consider.
One is defined by the foil provided by those two axioms, as I just said.
One has to do with the effects of Googling on the conventions of normal academic discourse.
Richard Rorty, who writes well about this, has suggested the great American shift from metaphors of depth to metaphor is of breath,
from probing one thing deeply to assembling and comparing many things.
But I say no more about that here. The last two aspects the combinatorial and simulative powers of the machine take up the rest of my time here.
OK, back to my adaptation of Goodwin's diagram, with emphasis added in the middle bit to shift the discussion from the reductive translation and the
expansive translation via construal to that middle stage to the black box where the bits are crunched here,
perhaps especially intellectual weed control. Clifford Geertz this term is needed.
Many have said following Lady out of Lovelace's dictum that the machine can only do what it is told to do.
Very, very reassuring that or in the anxious language of the mid 20th century, the computer is but a fast moron.
In the 1950s, IBM made the slur doctrine to salve public fears of artificial intelligence, and then the mantra went viral.
If you look into the literature of the period, it's everywhere. But such is not the machine we have,
which in essential respects is the machine Herman Goldstein and John von Neumann addressed in their 1947 report on what programming it would entail.
The first ever paper on programming. They pointed out that the difference in design, which makes the crucial difference,
is the provision that allows a running programme to conditional on the outcome of previous operations.
And more recently conditional on refine things in the outer world that it interacts with to deviate
from the linear sequence of instructions or even to rewrite those instructions on the fly.
Here again is Goldstone's and von Neumann's flow diagram, as they called it, illustrating the point.
They explained, and I quote the words here, and I want you to to notice them.
They explained that coding is not a static process of translation,
but rather the technique of providing a dynamic background to control the automatic evolution of a meaning
as the machine follows unspecified routes in unspecified ways in order to accomplish specified tasks.
That's Herbert Simon's remark that the computer does what it has been told, but not in the sense usually intended.
And Marvin Minsky's observation that the digital computer has given the word machine a new meaning.
The high level of complications which result from this design, Goldstein and von Neumann went on to note, are not hypothetical or exceptional.
They are indeed the norm. The power of the machine is essentially due to them.
That is to the extensive combinatorial possibilities which they indicate.
In essence, as von Neumann suggested, four years later,
machines of the digital all or nothing type work by combining and recombining the data under given constraints until coherent patterns emerge.
In a nutshell, then the value added at this stage is combinatorial.
For an analogy, to make this somewhat more familiar. Take what happens in a research library.
Which provides a large number of modular resources in a standard format so that a
variety of readers with unforeseen purposes may combine and recombine them ad lib.
Now we've had such a device with us, at least since the library of Asher Bonner Paula in the 7th century before the Christian era.
If I'm not mistaken, on a larger scale, in more recent form, we see more or less the same with the web on a smaller scale within a single codex,
particularly obvious when it is designed as a reference work,
such as a critical addition built to foster recumbent material liberties and of course, the works of Voltaire.
And it's come immediately to mind as fit corpora for such treatment.
But my point is the familiarity of this way of working,
though by now perhaps unfamiliar means of statistical tools for finding patterns in masses of data.
Once again, distant reading is the most obvious example of work.
Surprises from the process begin to emerge.
Alan Turing suggested in 1950 by analogy with the critical mass of a nuclear reaction to a quantitative threshold of complexity.
Note you add a little bit and add a little bit and add a little bit, and all of a sudden different things start to happen in digital humanities.
We find cogent surprises from style, a metric analysis as well as from distant reading.
For example, see the work of the Australian John Burroughs and the pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab.
All 16 of them, I think there are no. Including the latest one by somebody and Moretti about finding patterns in large number of images.
The last aspect of reasoning with the machine.
That I will consider begins with synthetic modelling for modelling for is commonplace in engineering as a way of converging on an optimal design.
For example, of an aeroplane wing in historical or archaeological research,
its aim is to create a symbolic room of a phenomenon that no longer exists in whole or in part
from whatever evidence is at hand and whatever reliable conjectures may still be possible.
Examples are the Roman Forum and a greater challenge. The Theatre of Pompey in Rome, of which very little visible remains.
These have been reconstructed visually by by such modelling. You can find all this on YouTube.
Modelling for can also be used in the manner of a thought experiment to speculate about what might be or might have been.
Historians don't like that very much, but it's useful in teaching, apparently modelling for blurs into simulation when the model is as it were,
turned loose to see what can be learnt from it, from interacting with it and changing its parameters.
Simulation is used to study phenomena that are difficult or impossible to observe.
Or as the historian of the US Manhattan Project, the bomb project.
Wrote. Phenomena which are too far from the course of ordinary terrestrial experience to be grasped immediately or easily.
The physicists of Los Alamos reached beyond their terrestrial experience by simulating the random
interactions of neutrons in a nuclear chain reaction using the so-called Monte Carlo technique.
Peter Gillison has written very illuminating Leigh on the subject closer to our own interests.
Linguists have used simulation to study the migration of dialects.
Naval historians to approximate the course of the battle at sea.
In the physical sciences, including climatology simulation was just about evil with the invention of digital computing machinery.
Indeed, the sciences were a driving force in its early development.
Work in economics and other social sciences followed soon after.
Most of us have forgotten that there is a rich and valuable history of simulation in the creative arts from the
nineteen sixties and seventies of possible worlds and of works of art co-created interaction with the viewer.
There is, in other words, a long and complex tradition of modelling of the more imaginative,
less mimetic kind that offers us lessons and risk-taking and its rewards from which we have very much to learn.
I want to conclude by giving you some idea of the limb out on which I now invite you to claim for a view of new things.
The philosopher Paul Humphreys, University of Virginia, argues that in going out on that limb with computing beyond what we can do,
otherwise, scientific epistemology ceases to be human epistemology.
I think that David Gooding is right,
that the humanness of our knowledge is a matter of what we do with what we learn in extent so from what we could otherwise not reach.
Before I conclude with an example illustrating what I mean with that,
with keen awareness of how nervous we are apt to get about venturing out or up beyond the ground, we take to be solid.
Allow me to recommend to bracing touchstones. First.
American essayist Elaine Scaries 1992 article The Made Up and the Made Reel Second Part B of Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking's 1983 book,
representing an intervening. Experts in these areas will have more recent items to recommend I trust, but these two,
as well as several others that I absolutely forbid myself to mention, mark important moments of light on my subject.
Elsewhere,
I have argued that it is far more useful and true to the practise of simulation that is to the use of the machine to reach for knowledge too
far from the course of ordinary terrestrial experience to regard the machine not merely as a tool for pushing back the fence of the law.
As Jacob Pronouncer characterised science nor merely as a tool for adventurous play,
but as a processes for the imagination, the range is a long, lean, scary spectrum from the making up to the making real.
I have suggested that at least from the perspective of the disciplines of baking simulation is the essential genius of the machine.
And so what we must understand about it and learn to employ.
I have suggested the simulation as a tool for restructuring our experiences of the world.
That, as anthropologist Yaron Mimica says of the combinatorial ethanol mathematics of the way people in Indonesia, it is Mithal poetic.
Other recent work in ethanol mathematics and in the history of combinatorics suggests that cosmological world making by
combining and recombining units of experience such as the digits we are born with is as close to a universal language.
After Babbel, as we are likely to get. Labelmates is calculated us and our own combinatorics belong in this worldwide tradition.
Fascinating, isn't it,
that the device from which we have so often expected closure turns out to be so paradoxically a tool that does exactly the opposite?
Historian of biology, Evelyn Fox Keller has cautioned us, read everything she's written, she's wonderful.
Noting that simulation changes sometimes radically from discipline to discipline,
I have argued for its continuity across disciplines so as to project it where it is not had much hit, where it is not yet made much headway.
What then might it look like in the disciplines of the humanities for a suggestive answer?
The best I know I turned to John Wall's Virtual Poles Cross project, which has led already to the larger virtual St Paul's.
It is an auditory simulation of John Dunne's Gunpowder Day sermon at Paul's cross,
as it was in London on 5th November 16 22 with supporting visualisations, which that is one.
As you will know, both the mediaeval St Paul's Cathedral and the Poles Cross Preaching Station, which you see there on the right within its grounds,
were destroyed together with the surrounding buildings and the great fire of London in 60 and six.
So in simulating the acoustics there, there is much room for conjecture.
Walls aim he's a brave man is to explore early modern preaching through performance by simulating
all of what Dan's congregation would could reasonably expected to have heard on that day.
While in a number of other early modernists argue that the sermons of the time were their performances.
The text we have merely traces of them consider an argument by analogy.
Would we mistake the snippet in the upper left from the score of the Goldberg variations for box music?
The bid at the lower right from the script of Tennessee Williams A Streetcar named Desire for the play.
Of course not. We would know immediately that they are instructions for interpretive performances of the music and the drama, respectively.
Just as now, I I hope you will think of programming code such as this as instructions for a different sort of interpretive performance.
But we are so inured to silent reading that we are likely to regard this kind of thing as the primary object.
And so by extension, to overlook that for the sermon in pols words from his letter to the Romans.
Faith comes by hearing. Social cohesion and political unity come also as in the case of this sermon, polocrosse sermons were composed.
It's temporary from notes by a preacher who faced a congregation.
This is wall talking face to congregation gathered in open air and surrounded by a host of distractions,
including the birds, the dogs, the horses, the bells and each other.
Dramatic engagement with the congregation was essential to their success.
What do we need as scholars in order to get closer to the sermon as it actually was?
Near contemporary evidence have done sermon was confined to that first printed edition of sixteen forty nine on the left.
Until Jeanne Shami identified British Library manuscript Royal 17B 20 in 1995 as a scribble presentation copy corrected in Dunn's own hand.
This is very likely the manuscript that was produced at the request of James, the first from Dunn's, notes hours, days or weeks after the event.
He preached from notes, not from a text, as I am twenty seven years passed before the text was printed.
The great fire of destroyed almost everything, but not quite everything relevant to the reconstruction.
Just 17 years after that. So what is going on?
The project? While his written is about what we are doing when we believe we have discovered from experience with a digital environment.
Things about past events that are not documented by traditional sources.
Indeed, what are we doing? This is the brink of the new or is it so very new?
One may wish to retreat to safer ground, but I wonder just how safe that ground is when one looks closely,
how much we build inferential step by inferential step.
And is safety our goal positive knowledge of the sort Latter-Day Positive this quest for is ephemeral, the history,
philosophy, sociology and psychology of the sciences from Thomas Kroon onwards furnish a good corrective.
Again, I refer you to Ian Hackings writings. We must, of course, be scrupulously careful and cautious for imagination as a wild beast.
My Hope for Wolves project. His wonderful project is that someday soon it can become a dynamic simulation in which you
and I can twiddled the knobs and see what happens if this or that conjecture is altered.
What if that building were there? What if the building material were something else and so on and so forth?
Surreal Lootera. Seriously, to play and to play imaginatively is what our machine is all about.
Only Wall and his collaborators at North Carolina State University can do that now, and only quite slowly.
And I very much hope that they, as they work, are keeping laboratory notebooks so that we can begin to follow in David Goodwin's footsteps.
To do that, we need a much wider, more institutionally committed gathering of the disciplinary tribes here that disciplinary tribes in my book,
that's what digital humanities is for. Thank you very much.