Qué son y qué no son las Humanidades Digitales. Buenas prácticas
Unsworth, John. 2000. «What is Humanities Computing and What is Not». En Distinguished Speakers Series of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. University of Maryland
Resumen EGA
Why one would ask a question such as “What is humanities computing?”
- Because the computer is a general-purpose machine (in fact, a general-purpose modeling machine). We need to specify Something that I would call humanities computing, in which the computer is used as tool for modeling humanities data and our understanding of it.
- We need to distinguish between Charlatans and DH. one way in which that degree can be measured is by the interactivity offered to users who wish to frame their own research questions. If there is none offered, and no interactivity, then the project is pure charlatanism. If it offers some (say, keyword searching), then it is a bit more real. If it offers structured searching, a bit more real. If it offers combinatorial queries, more real. If it allows you to change parameters and values in order to produce new models, a bit more real. If it lets you introduce new algorithms for calculating the outcomes of changed parameters and values, a bit more real, and so on.
- To justify, new and continuing investments of personal, professional, institutional, and cultural resources.
Humanities computing as model or mimicry: Examples: A catalogue record (vs. full-text representation).
Humanities computing as a way of reasoning: Example: A Relational Database. Think about how a relational database establishes the grounds of rational inference by establishing fields in records in tables, and think about how it sanctions any sort of question having to do with any combination of the elements in its tables, but actually recommends certain kinds of queries by establishing relationships between elements of different tables.
Humanities computing as a set of ontological commitments: The commitments are in effect a strong pair of glasses that determine what we can see, bringing some part of the world into sharp focus, at the expense of blurring other parts. SGML, this view of text misses certain textual ontologies—metaphor, for example—because they are not hierarchical, or more accurately, they violate hierarchy. That’s not a sign of a flaw in SGML or in the OHCO thesis, but a sign that both are true knowledge representations—they bring certain things into focus and blur others, allowing us to pay particular attention to particular aspects of what’s out there.
Humanities computing as shaped by the need for efficient computation: The reason SGML is the way it is, the reason it demands that elements nest properly within a specified hierarchy, is to enable efficient computation.
Humanities computing as shaped by the need for human communication:Knowledge representations are also the means by which we express things. That in turn presents two important sets of questions. One set is familiar: How well does the representation function as a medium of expression? And the second is How well does it function as a medium of communication? That is, how easy is it for us to "talk" or think in that language?
Humanities Computing and Formal Expression:knowledge representations are expressed in formal languages and this means we must provide unambiguous expressions of our ideas, and provide them according to stated rules.