How do you think something through with technology?
Descartes in his 1637 Discourse on Method1 describes a moment of solitude that allowed him to talk to himself about his thoughts and to develop a method for thinking correctly. Here is how he describes the solitude he needed:
as I was returning to the army from the coronation of the emperor, I was halted by the onset of winter in quarters where, having no diverting company and fortunately also no cares or emotional turmoil to trouble me, I spent the whole day shut up in a small room heated by a stove, in which I could converse with my own thoughts at leisure. Among the first of these was the realization that things made up of different elements and produced by the hands of several master craftsmen are often less perfect than those on which only one person has worked. (Discourse on Method, Part 2, p. 12)
The Discourse is important to the practices of the humanities because it introduced an influential and accessible method for anyone to do philosophy without needing to be widely read or part of an intellectual community. His story of method, and its accompanying provisional moral code for behaviour without certainty, is one of the fables that founded modern philosophy and in particular the solitary, doubting and reflective practice that still dominates how we think we should think things through.
But practices are changing, and older forms of communcal inquiry are being remixed into modern research. We have come to recognize how intellectual work is participatory even when it includes moments of solitary meditation. Internet conferencing tools like Skype allow us to remediate dialogical practices, social networks like Wikipedia achieve wonders through volunteer group work and the communal research cultures of the arts collaboratory are infecting the humanities. Accessable computing, the amount of data available, and the opportunities of new media have provoked textual disciplines to think again about practices and methods as we try to build the digital libraries, process millions of digital books, and imagine the research cyberinfrastructure to support the next generation of scholarship. The new projects of the humanities tend to be big and need a variety of skills for implementation, skills rarely found in one solitary scholar/programmer let alone a Cartsian humanist. And thus we find ourselves working in teams, reflecting on how to best organize the teams, and then reflecting on what it means to reason through with others.
Hermeneuti.ca, like Descartes' "histoire" is a story about the turn to methods, this time methods of interpretation. Hermeneuti.ca is both a story of return to dialogical practices that predate Descartes and introduces computer-assisted methods that are just becoming hermeneutically interesting with the digitization of the human record. Specifically Hermeneuti.ca returns to method in four binary ways:
In short, Hermeneuti.ca is a weaving together of hermeneutical things both print and electronic, text and code, essays and reflections or narrative and interaction, all of which are a thinking through of interpretative method through computing. Hermeneuti.ca is meant to illustrate one of our conclusions, that code is interpretation and should be woven closely with other hermeneutical things.
To confront the privilege of solitary reflection in academic practice we would do well to pay attention to how Descartes introduces his story of method. Descartes calls his Discourse a personal history or fable (“histoire”) which “you can imitate” or not. It illustrates his practices for readers to imitate and these practices lead the reader into his method and provisional moral code. While the formal method gets attention, the story of the provisional practices doesn't, in part because the practices prefigure the formal method. That story, with all its baggage, gets passed over on the road to method. It is a story about doubting oneself and others in order to rid oneself of possible influence. It is a story of isolating oneself from traditions of disputation in order to think alone, think afresh, think thoroughly, free oneself of error (especially from the errors of others) by assuming nothing, and think about thinking. This story of thinking thoroughly has three aspects that interest us,
It is not surprising that this train of doubting, solitary and reflective thought leads to the Cogito, “I think, therefore I am”, from which personal certainty he methodically rebuilds his ideas. The irony of the Discourse is that if his practice appeals to you, then you should suspect its results as the authority of another, Descartes, and start all over by interrogating your thinking practices. The rhetorical power of the Cogito is that Descartes bets you will end up right where he did, all the more convinced since you followed (even if as only a reader) his "correct conduct" of reason not his conclusions.3 But that's the point - the Discourse is first presented as a guide towards method which you can imitate and reuse, not an authority to consider true - and that's going to be our point, that you really shouldn't imitate our practice without thinking it through too which is why we have provided you the tools to try it yourself. The image of the solitary Cartesian philosopher has influenced the practice of the humanities about what it is to do intellectual work; perhaps it is time to reanimate other interactive images of practice - bring them into the open without abandoning them the way Dr. Frankenstein abandoned his solitary creation. In our online interpretation we have stitched together hermeneutical things so that you can try tools-as-methods as you read about them. Our story is one of thinking through together, as we hope yours will be.
How can you think collaboratively?
Knowing G was leaving for Alberta, we decided to try some experiments in text analysis together while we still had access to quarters, in this case a lab away from our offices. Rather than be diverted by gossip we thought we would direct our conversations to the intersection of methods, tools and interpretation by taking a small project through from conception to writing in one day - a day set aside away from the distractions of other work. We spent the day closed up together in a lab overheated by all the computers, where we had the leisure to talk while thinking through tools and experimenting with texts. Among the many reflections of the day we noticed how few questions you can ask alone through one tool and how much more perfection there was to interpretation in dialogue that weaves evidence together from several tools by different masters as needed by the questions at hand.
Computer assisted research in the humanities, by contrast to the Cartesian story and traditional humanities practices, has almost always been collaborative not solitary. This is due to the variety of skills needed to implement digital humanities projects, and because of the relationship between the practices of interpretation and the development of the tools of interpretation, be they text analysis tools or digital editions. This difference, while acknowledged in various ways, has been a professional hindrance as anyone who submits a CV for promotion with nothing but co-authored papers knows.4 More importantly it could be a signficant scholarly problem separating the interpreter/scholar from the implementer of the scholarly methods (programmer.) Willard McCarty notes that the introduction of "software separated the conception of the problems (domain of the scholar) from the computational means of working them out (bailiwick of the programmer) and so came at a signficant cost."5 As computing is introduced into research it forces collaboration and collaboration across very different fields. Typically humanities scholars know little about programming and software engineering, and programmers know little about humanities scholarship.6
There are obviously all sorts of workarounds that take place, but rather than skirt the issue we propose that collaboration is the normal practice of humanities computing and should therefore be imagined as part of any discussion of method. Solitary time, while much desired in the bustle of academic life, is withdrawn from a background of working together in various structured and unstructured ways. The very desire for solitary time for reflection proves our point - what is normal is collaborating with students in discovery or meeting with colleagues for service. Thinking alone is the dream of the humanities not the ground from which to develop our method.
Collaboration, however, can take many forms. Working on Hermeneuti.ca a we modeled our collaborative practice loosely on a programming methodology called Extreme Programming (XP) which includes practices of Pair Programming and which belongs in the wider category of Agile Programming, for which reason we call our practice Agile Interpretation (AI).7 What is “extreme” about such methods is how extremely different they are from what we expect of best practices. Traditional programming wisdom emphasized the need for careful analysis and specification before coding, while XP recommends rapid iterations of coding and reflection to achieve immediate goals without worrying about the long term. You don't analyze the situation and then fully specify the final product before coding. You scratch an itch in a short iteration, look at it, and then start adding stuff. Often that means throwing out your code and starting all over when adding functionality leads to redesigning basic structures. The traditional wisdom held rewriting your code to be a sign of failure, XP makes it part of the process. XP also recommends working in pairs right down to the typing of code. You don't meet and then go off to code alone, you code in pairs alternating typing and guiding - one person in the pair coding at any moment to force discussion with the other. Likewise, where traditional practices in the humanities are solitary or foced compromised collaborations, AI is purposefully collaborative – at its heart is pair-work where one person performs the work of interpretation (or programming) while the other looks ahead or reflects on what is needed. The idea is to maximize the dialogue between the scholar function and development function to the point where it isn't clear which is which. Where the humanities aim to be theoretically grounded - you are supposed to have it all theorized beforehand, AI is pragmatic, starting with experimentation and generating hermeneutical theories as the things of interpretation like texts and tools. Where the humanities avoid method in favor of traditional and largely unexamined practices, AI makes methods (and the instantiation of methods in tools) an issue discussed through the experiment. Its hard to avoid talking about what you are doing when only one person has the keyboard and everything has to be negotiated. Try it. Above all, where the Cartesian practices involve reflection and talking with yourself, AI is about talking with another with complementary skills and recording those conversations in parallel notes.
The particular practice we followed involved redeveloping tools as we wanted to pose new questions and as then continually testing the tools in the context of the concrete experiment. We were fortunate that we actually could hack our tools as we needed. There was no divide between scholar and programmer, we were both of us capable of both. The hybrid book/web site hermeneuti.ca is the record, outcome and essay of three experiments, with accompanying reflective chapters.
Heremeneuti.ca is a work about and for the application of computing to humanities research, specifically to textual studies and interpretation. We have both been part of a field that used to be call Humanities Computing, and is increasingly called the Digital Humanities, which is one of the communities of practice that has been negotiating this application of computing into the humanities.8 To some extent this book is result of decades of development and reflection in this field and we will on occaision engage in dialogue with others in the field, especially around tools and collabortion, though this is not a survey of the field. One of the characteristics of the field is that it has focused and supported the development of applied technology rather than being strongly theoretical. Humanities computing has through training, conferences and projects bridged the gap of scholarly practice and technology development rather than a theory - practice gap. Humanities computing was often based in units that supported computing for humanists in universities and therefore brought together faculty and staff, programmers and students to run labs, run servers, and develop tools. In short, computing humanists tended to build digital things, often for research uses by others, rather than theorize. In Canada there has been a long tradition of building concording tools, starting with the PRORA concording tools, whose manual was published in 19669, to TACT in 1989, and the TAPoR10 project which led to and supported Hermeneuti.ca. Heremeneuti.ca is, by virtue of being a hybrid of text and tool, another contribution in this tradition, and one that reflects back on what these code things are. Willard McCarty, one of the pioneers in the field and author of a book titled Humanities Computing11 (which is one of the first attempts to theorize the field) writes, in an essay he gave as a plenary lecture at CaSTA 2006 (Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis),
But the more important lesson Iʹve learned is that although better tools are possible, the humanist’s perspective on tools problematizes them. That is ultimately the point of tool‐development in humanities computing, just as problematizing our methods and objects of study is ultimately the point of applying the tools we do have. (McCarty, “Beyond the word: modelling literary context”, page 1, PDF 12)
Hermeneuti.ca is in this tradition of problematizing methods through developing tools, but we have tried to more tightly couple the development (writing of code) and interpretation (using the code.) Hermeneuti.ca tries to instatiate, through its hybrid structure, a position that the lines between tool and text are blurred. Voyeur is isn't a better tool, or the one everyone has been waiting for, so much as another contribution to an ongoing dialogue of developmental research. In addition, as mentioned above, we believe that collaborative methodologies like Agile Interpretation are at the heart of humanities computing, and therefore Hermeneuti.ca also presents itself as a dialogue. Here is where we think we diverge from the service tradition in Humanities Computing that sees the field as a "methods commons" for reseach elsewhere.13 For us Humanities Computing is not just the development of tools for others (that would be software engineering) or the application of tools by others to humanities problems (that would be digital humanities), it is also the set of practices that problematizes methodology, tools and interpretation at the same time. There is now a tradition of research development and discussion within the community independent of utilitarian concerns. Heremeneuti.ca, is a contribution in that tradition, from and for the field and involved in development as a form of research. Our research is simultaneously about "how we might think" while "thinking through" prototyping, coding, documenting and testing with real questions. It is a particular type of research craft where one of the important outcomes was a re-imagination of how text analysis tools should be designed to fit in the cycle of research. Voyeur, the tool reflection of Hermeneuti.ca, is a new text analysis environment meant to support Agile Interpretation in the following ways:
Voyeur is designed to be constantly rewritten and to support different interfaces. There has been much hang-wringing about how we are constantly reinventing our tools - we think it is a good thing ... called interpretation. Extreme Programming is built around turning change, refactoring, and iteration into a virtue. We have come to the conclusion that if reinterpreting, and therefore rebuilding, tools for the humanities is an inescapable part of problematizing method then we should design an environment for reimplementation instead of being tempted by the teleology of “getting it right once and for all”.
Like Descartes' Discourse, this work you're trying is also about thinking, but of a very different type of thinking-through that both returns to an earlier model of how to do work and looks forward to how to do it with the hermeneutical tools at hand today. If you will, we can start by saying this book takes a different path back than Descartes took. Our story does not reject authority or talking with others and, in fact, it is the story of writing and software development by two people working together in different ways. Our story does not present solitary thinking as a dialogue, instead we present our communal thinking as a monologue, or, as you will see, an interactive essay where the dialogue is between hermeneutical things. Nor does our story begin with reflecting about thinking but instead with the interpretation of interpretative thinking and its methods or tools.
What we have in common is that this work is about thinking through, but we will play with another sense of thinking through – in addition to the sense of thinking about or thinking thoroughly through method. This book is about thinking through as thinking with or by means of extensions of the mind. It is about thinking through with others and with technology where Descartes shunned both.
Thinking through is rooted in one of the paradigmatic styles of doing philosophy, dialogue (as opposed to solitary meditation). The Greek “dia” in the word “dialogos” meaning "conversation" does not, as many assume, mean “two”, but instead can be translated “through”, “between” or “exchange”. Thus a playful etymology of “dialogue” would explain it as “thinking through” or that which comes "through conversation" whether it is the Cartesian inner dialogue or a conversation with another14.
Socrates, in one of Xenophon’s dialogues, played with the connection between dialogos (conversation) and dialego – (to classify). Xenophon writes in Memorabilia IC, vi. 115, “The very word ‘discussion,’ according to him (Socrates), owes its name to the practice of meeting together for common deliberation, sorting, discussing things after their kind: and therefore one should be ready and prepared for this and be zealous for it…”. In the Greek the joke is obvious because there is only one word dialegontas, a form of dialego for both sorting and for discussing. Dialogue for the Greeks was clearly connected with thinking through, by way of sorting and classifying, a practice illustrated in many of the Platonic dialogues as they sort through different definitions of the virtues.
Why text technology now?
In this book, however, we are going to concentrate on ways of thinking through technology, specifically text technologies which we believe are of epochal importance. But why text technology? Why is information technology and in particular text technology so important now?
The first reason is because, thanks to Google Books, researchers may soon have access to millions of books in digital form. In October of 2008 a lawsuit between Google and publishers' and authors' organizations was settled which, if approved by the judge, will dramatically change the amount of textual data available to researchers as it would provide for research use of the entire corpus.16 Our capacity and tools for analyzing texts have grown out of concording tools designed to handle one book or a small collection, not millions of books. The types of questions we ask, also tend to be about individual works, small collections of a single author, or comparing works. What sorts of tools, methods and questions can handle millions?17
But is not just researchers who need access to text technologies. According to a 2003 study “How Much Information?” by Peter Lyman, Hal R. Varian and colleagues at Berkley18, there was about 5 exabytes of new print, film, magnetic and optical information produced in 2002. And it is growing by about 30% a year.
Of this only a small amount – a mere 1,634 petabytes19 is print, but consider that 2 petabytes is all the U.S. Academic research libraries. Most of this print information is office documents: North Americans are consuming 11,916 sheets of paper and they estimate that half of that is used in printers and copiers for office documents.
A more recent, and more alarming study, “The Digital Universe”20 prepared by IDC, a “global provider of market intelligence” and commissioned by EMC2 (a storage solutions company) estimates that,
In 2006, the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated was 1,288 × 1018 bits. In computer parlance, that’s 161 exabytes or 161 billion gigabytes. This is about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written.
They go on to say that “between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to this digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes” (p. 1).21
It should not be surprising that, according to “How Much Information,” the internet is the fastest growing medium, accounting for 532,897 terrabytes between the web, e-mail, and instant messaging. Most of this is encoded text, even on the web, where HTML and PDF account for 17.8% and 9.2% respectively while images and movies account for 23.2% and 4.3% respectively. If you think about how people search and find information on the web through search engines like Google you can see the importance of text. Even if a growing amount of the information on the web is time-based media like video, it is text that we use to search for that information, it is text that is indexed, and it is text that makes up the metadata.
This explosion of information is predicted to trigger ethical and privacy issues.
IDC predicts that by 2010, while nearly 70% of the digital universe will be created by individuals, organizations (businesses of all sizes, agencies, governments, associations, etc.) will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of at least 85% of that same digital universe. (p. 1)
We are already seeing the fall out from the tensions between individually created information and corporate management of it in the recent cover story in the CAUT Bulletin, “Email Outsourcing Threatens Privacy & Academic Freedom” which reports on the Lakehead University Faculty Association grievance against the university for outsourcing e-mail to Google Gmail whose terms of use allow it to store and process information in the United States which opens the possibility that the email may be monitored if ordered to do so.
In short, we are practicing thinking in the humanities in an epoch of change in the amount, the privacy and the medium of information that we care about. And this matters.
In computing there are two paradigms for our relationship with computers, the first goes back to Alan Turing and his 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence” and is the Artificial Intelligence paradigm where computers can replace us or join us in a “conversation game”22. The second goes back to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article for the The Atlantic Monthly, “As We May Think”23 where computers extend our ability to deal with an overload of information.
There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
… The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
Bush is a “high modernist” and proposes more technology to solve the problem of too much information. His proposals include a device called the Memex which, while not a computing device, anticipated what Ted Nelson in the 1960s called “hypertext” – Bush imagined a web of information with associative links connecting them and trails through the information which would make what today we call “knowledge management” easier.
Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.24
Vannevar Bush was thinking about thinking, but through the imagining of technology to extend it. Bush’s ideas influenced others like Douglas Engelbart who in 1968 gave the so-called “mother of all demos” of his oNLine System or NLS. At the Fall Joint Computer Conference at the Convention Centre in San Francisco on December 9th, 1968 he demonstrated live a system that didn’t replace human thinking with AI, but augmented it. Among other things the NLS used a mouse (for the first time), had a paper paradigm that prefigured the Xerox PARC GUI, and had video conferencing, outlining, hypertext and email. This was shown to computer scientists who until then had been mostly developing computer systems for batchA batch process refers to the execution of a program (or multiple programs) without human interaction. This is the dominant mode of operation for mainframe computers and high performance computing systems. processing of information – an interaction paradigm where the computer is a servant who replaces human work rather than extend our capacities.
Englebart, in his 1962 report “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”25 outlines the philosophical framework that drove his revolutionary engineering – in particular, what he calls a “Neo-Worfian” hypothesis to the effect that,
Both the language used by a culture, and the capability for effective intellectual activity are directly affected during their evolution by the means by which individuals control the external manipulation of symbols.
This is not an original hypothesis – we can trace it back to the story of the invention of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus. In the humanities Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy built on Havelock’s Preface to Plato arguing that a change in literacy made possible by the development of writing changed the way we learn and yes, even think, an idea that McLuhan took up. The point here is not to revisit this school of thought about media – as important as that school is to contemporary computing – but to draw attention back to Engelbart. What is significant about the oNLine System is that it implemented these ideas about thinking and showed an alternative way of doing intellectual work with computers, an alternative to replacing the other in conversation by augmenting our conversation, and that is the paradigm that now dominates our desktop. If in the humanities we are still Cartesians and want to methodically strip away the other to think by ourselves, in computing we are Socratics and are extending our reach and dialogue over a net.
Engelbart focused on thinking as goal oriented intellectual work and defined four classes of augmentation means: Artifacts (including tools for the manipulation of symbols), Language, Methodology, and Training. What he imagined he describes thus,
The system we want to improve can thus be visualized as a trained human being together with his artifacts, language, and methodology. The explicit new system we contemplate will involve as artifacts computers, and computer-controlled information-storage, information-handling, and information-display devices. The aspects of the conceptual framework that are discussed here are primarily those relating to the human being’s ability to make significant use of such equipment in an integrated system.
In short, he inaugurated a field that today we call human-computer interaction or HCI. He asked us to think about intellectual work and imagine how technology augment us. He thought about thinking by implementing experimental interfaces that showed and explained his ideas. For that matter Vannevar Bush and Alan Turing also imagined (though they didn't build) machines as a way of thinking about thinking. Hermeneuti.ca sees itself in this tradition of prototyping thinking technology as a way of expressing ideas about interpretation.
Which brings us to the heart of this book, the particular type of thinking through that is possible at this moment. The problem in Science, Technology and Society studies, as Carl Mitcham puts it, is that there are two discourses that are at odds. On the one hand you have the discourses of engineering philosophies of science and technology, which like Engelbart tend to take for granted that we can improve thinking and the human condition through technnology. On the other hand you have humanities philosophies of technology like that of Heidegger or Jacques Ellul that consider our approach to technology and technological thinking the problem in the first place. While engineers prototype technology was a way of thinking through, philosophers step back from technology and critique it and the instrumental thinking that reduces everything to a problem that technology can solve. Both stories believe they can account for the other and therefore don’t need to enter into dialogue.
This book recognizes that the two discourses are difficult to reconcile, but we propose this book as a thinking through technology that engages technology in dialogue, both by using it, by creating it and by reflecting on it. Our way forward is to engage in technology design as a creative and critical practice as humanists and that is what we want to call thinking through in a dialogical sense. We want to combine the creative work of Engelbart that hypothesizes augmentation and then tries to build such technologies of augmentation, with the dialogical tradition of thinking in philosophy. Such thinking through is about the interruption characteristic of conversation more than the efficiency of solving problems. This thinking through would be an alternative to Descartes’ solitary practice. What would be some of the features of such a practice?
Thinking through is a practice, not a philosophy or a theory or a object. It is, if you will, a way of interpreting the evidence we care about with others. It is a participatory practice where one learns by engaging, making and modeling. The tools woven into this book we therefore consider hermeneutical things, or hermeneutica.
There are, however, some dangers ahead is such doubled practices. The first is the disappearance of the author. To paraphrase what Shaftesbury said about dialogue, “the author is annihilated, and the reader, being in no way addressed, stands for nobody”.26 This is a danger Heidegger and other philosophers of technology talk about, the danger that tools, when ready-at-hand, are transparent and the creator’s authorial responsibility for the tool is hidden. When using a hammer you don't wonder about the author and how the tool is an extension of their interpretation that you should be wary of. To avoid this danger we have to ask how one might interpret tools. If tool development is research then it should be open to scrutiny as other types of research are, but open source is not openness in the way that a philosophical paper is open. It is hard to interpret things designed to be thought with rather than thought about because they are designed to withdraw, much as it has always been hard to interpret philosophical dialogues, at least as the position of their author. This is not to give undue value to Romantic ideas about the importance of the author, it is simply to point out that the interpretation of technologies is hard to do, especially why using them. Matt Kirschenbaum’s book Mechanisms27 shows us one way forward. In that book he adapts bibliographic practices to electronic classics of electronic literature from Michael Joyce’s Afternoon to early adventure style computer games. He reads these as literature. We are taking a different approach and reading tools as hermeneutical things.
The second, and more prosaic danger, is that entanglement leads to commoditization which corrupts research. David Noble in “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education”28 warns about “the commoditization of the research function of the university, transforming scientific and engineering knowledge into commercially viable proprietary products that could be owned and bought and sold in the market”. While we doubt there is any risk of being corrupted by commercialization in this project, especially since we are releasing the code under an open license, we do worry about the entanglement in the administration of technology. Could we walk away from our tools if we were convinced they were inadequate or inappropropriate? Does the weaving of development and critique mix practices that should be kept at arms-length for the sake of perspective? An easy answer is to argue that we have always been entangled, but I think that is sophistry as the entanglements in the humanities are usually trivial. No one really wants to buy our souls the way they want to buy pharmaceutical research results. That said, there is in the sort of humanities computing work that develops tools a very real difference and danger when you find you need to get grants, and to get grants you have to get matching funds from industry, and so on. Such engaged work is not by definition corrupt, but it is corruptible and that’s why I consider it a danger.
A third and final danger is that really a bundle of commitments that we can call the modernist commitments to progress through technique. To think through the development of possible technologies is to agree, at least provisionally, that there could be better designs. Bundled with the practices of design comes a hope of improvement and a belief in progress. While this hope can be moderated by care for unanticipated outcomes, and by a skepticism regarding the hyper-ventilated claims of computing, you don’t do it without any hope and you do such work in the knowledge that you can’t anticipate how it will be used ultimately. I regard this danger as unavoidable – it is the danger of any action – any involvement in the world that is not cynical. We all, in some form or another, try things out in the face of dangers, and that is our hope. For that matter, it is the danger of any other type of intellectual work – you could be misinterpreted. Without the confidence of an intellectual ground or clear ends we are all local-modernists – trying to make a way forward in the local, but in ignorance of the outer grounds or end.
Descartes’ Discourse is important to the practices of the humanities because it marks a shift to the explicit discussion of method. Descartes, when he introduces his method as a personal history which “you can imitate” or not is suggesting how the reader should engage the work that has influenced how research is done that has dominated the methodological imagination of he humanities since. This book is about an alternative dialogical method where interpretation is done in conversation, specifically three types of conversation which suggest three ways you could read and engage us:
Voyeur was developed in part as a result of our first experiment, “Now Analyze That” where we found it difficult to swiftly move from the analytical tool environment where textual evidence is explored to the environment of the essay where a new interpretation is crafted. If you will, we had trouble flying through from interpretation (the environment and activity of interpreting evidence) to interpretation (the writing environment of the new essay.) Voyeur was designed, as mentioned above, to allow us to cycle back and forth from interpretation to interpretation. Voyeur is designed to work with the types of Web 2.0 online writing environments that have emerged from blogs, to wikis, to works like hermeneuti.ca, implemented in Drupal. As in any experiment in interactive interface, the goal was to get to a point where the practices of moving between tool and text were swift enough to be experienced as another thread of dialogue rather than the long wait of years for the tool to come along that lets you ask the next question. We hope we have enabled your iterative experimentation with text technologies. We hope with hermeneuti.ca you can move swiftly through from interpretation to interpretation and not be held back as we were. If the interaction works, you will soon find the limits of Voyeur, and when you want one more feature you will have caught the bug that infected us.
XP takes commonsense principles and practices to extreme levels.
There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.
Selection, in this broad sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a cabinetmaker. Yet, in a narrow sense and in other areas, something has already been done mechanically on selection.
The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
…
This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing. When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions.