Computers and the Humanities

The latest stop in my career, perhaps also the last stop, is taking me back to something I got interested in some time ago when I bought my first computer. That was actually in the 1980s, and the computer was an IBM PC. Along with some colleagues, I was editing a literature anthology, and appreciating the fact that revisions were so easy on the computer. Still to come were the Internet and email and the World Wide Web.

Now, of course, computers are everywhere, and soon all the information in the world will be available instantaneously online. Actually, we're almost there, or so it seems. But, in fact, there is much that is not yet available. And I suspect there always will be some information missing, either because it was lost, or forgotten, or protected, or just withheld. Nevertheless, there is an awful lot of stuff out there already, and it means that those who study stuff, and the relation between humans and stuff, are going to have to contend with so much information that they will never be able to master it all.

And so we turn, once more, to the computer to help us sort through the massive mounds of stuff so that we can begin to make sense of it. In the 21st century, humanists don't search for data, they mine it. Now that we've hit the mother lode, and all of the books and newspapers and records of all time in all languages are all online, searching for information soon leads to information overload. How can one be expected to make sense of everything all at once?

This, it strikes me, is more or less the opposite of what humanists used to do. In the not too distant past humanists worked on rather limited sets of data, building up their theories and interpretations in rather small increments. One began with a single author, or perhaps a genre, or a chronological period, or geographical location; a single arresting question to ask or theory to test against a rather defined and limited amount of available information. Often, the humanist scholar's task, a most enjoyable undertaking, was to go out and find information that was frequently hidden away in exotic places where one was expected to travel and search through collections of old books or artifacts, or literally dig around among the ruins of some ancient civilization. This could take many pleasant years of travel and research, many summers abroad looking among the records held by venerable institutions and public archives. Eventually, the scholar began to piece together an interpretation which could be tested in papers delivered to colleagues at conferences, in articles published in journals read by a few of one's peers and friends, and even in books, beautifully produced and bound by university presses.

Ah, but that was then. Now, with the click of a mouse, we can get answers to all our questions in a matter of seconds. In fact, we can find ourselves with just the opposite problem. Instead of needing to search for more information, we now must sift through mass quantities of data, all potentially relevant, all potentially important. Now, we must look not for more data, but for the meaning hidden in the vast amounts of data we have accumulated with such relative ease. Whereas before we began with a tiny seed of an idea and then looked for confirmation, constructing our meaning by filling in the gaps in our edifice of knowledge, now we begin with an enormous data dump, amidst which we must look for some meaningful pattern or design to which we can assign a meaning.

The only constant here is interpretation. The humanist is a maker of meaning. With sufficient imagination and skill we can see the shape of an entire culture in a single artifact from the past or present. Or, when confronted with great mounds of information, we can identify significant patterns or designs suggesting meaning. I submit that in either case, humanist knowledge is that knowledge which is invented by humanists. That's why it rarely endures for long. Tastes change, the pattern shifts, one meaning is supplanted by another. Of the making of books there is no end, whether we publish them on paper or online.