I was Shocked! Shocked, I say!

The audacity, the sheer ungraciousness, they took Offense, Offense! That we Computer Scientists want to know how We can HELP these poor Humanists.

Well, I never!

And therein lies the crunch, no? Computer Scientists, various as they are , look at the world through a specific tunnel, while humanities students see the same world through a completely different set of lenses!

It all boils down to the Raison d’être we perceive for ourselves and that which is perceived for us by others.

So, why bother with Computer Science as a academic subject, why any humanities program, and – ultimately – why bother with Digital Humanities?

So, the generalized answer to why study anything is surely that as humans we are able to think beyond the immediate, to conceive the inconceivable and to ponder. So a few of us take this a little further, burrowing into a subject hoping to elicit some jewel to which we may stake a claim. And what then? While many remember the likes of Einstein, Galileo, Mozart and Archimedes, how many people can easily recall the person who won the Nobel prize for some subject 26 years ago?

Underlying this all is the question why bother with a certain subject?

Now, from a heritage begun by the ancient Greeks and evolved by the Romans, enhanced by the Hebrew deliberations of the last 4 centuries prior to the Christian Era, and then the preservation of this knowledge and advancement by the Arabs as the Christian Church repressed all higher learning in what we now call ‘The Dark Ages’, we derive the Universities of the Renaissance and the disciplines that become the stalwart of human study: the Humanities – Literature, Philosophy, History; and within the Philosophical world we get Mathematics. And as the printing  press revolutionizes access to knowledge, certain fellows, Newton, Leibnitz, Halley and Boyle amongst them derive the Scientific Method.

in 1639 Halley using Kepler’s philosophical calculations observes that in an eight year period, one can observe the Transit of Venus across the Sun, thus allowing him to calculate the distance of the Earth from the Sun. In 1731 and 1769, this observation once more becomes possible and through much international scientific cooperation, the distance of the Earth from the Sun is more accurately measured.

Sometime in the late 19th Century, scientists are convinced that Scientific study has no more than another few decades before it is exhausted. And then Genetics were discovered …

Long story short, by the 20th Century science and thus technology become prominent in our daily lives, clean water, infant survival – the list goes on. Now we consider Climate Change and looking for Earth-like planets in other Solar systems such that we might go there if ever the Earth becomes too populous or otherwise uninhabitable.

Now, in recent years I have met a few students from English Literature, one studies the plays of Shelley and another compares how Woman are portrayed in a 1950’s feminist novel ‘The Raven’ to how they were described in Icelandic Sagas of the 10th century. We have Computer Scientists who dwell on whether P = NP or not and the possible consequences for Cryptography if ever proven true.

Now, most computer science graduates find work as applications developers building tools to better the use of data in business. And English Lit. graduates end up teaching English in schools – such is life.

But our question is how do we marry these two faculties – Humanities with Computer science. Now – note, Computer Science is not a faculty, unless you are at Carnegie Melon in which case you might be part of several Computer Science faculties.  Within CINY itself, CS is largely considered part of Mathematics, but at CCNY, CS is part of Engineering.

I remember looking for Computer Books in the University libraries at TAU back in the 1980’s, depending on which library you were at, the Dewey designation for Computer Science materials varied between several disparate numbers.

So, Computer Science is not all that well defined within the Academic community and Digital Humanities is even less so.

So again – we must ask, what is it all about? Are we looking at how computers (not necessarily Computer Science) can be utilized to further Humanities research? And if so, where are the Computational issues we can apply CS to?

August 27, 201

Our first lecture, and it was very interesting.

Review of Prescribed Readings

• So the ‘famous’ Rede Lecture of 1959.
  The bottom line here is the intuitive understanding that the Rich stay rich and the Poor stay poor – a common theme in the past few US Presidential Elections, in particular by John Edwards in the 2008 election Democrat Primary process.
• The End of University
  This New York Times 2006 article again looks at the divide between those who can afford academics and those for whom academia is a way to get into serious debt.

What We Gleaned in Discussion

We were 8 students: 4 from Computer Science (2 from Computer Vision and 2 from Machine Learning) and 4 from the ‘Humanities’ (2 from the Digital Humanities Master’s program, a true humanities student from English Literature, and a visiting Social Scientist)

The spectrum of Academic study, having the arts on one extremity and Math on the other was acknowledged.

Then we find that the people in our group are those who seem to want to find commonality between these dichotomies.

An interesting question was asked from the Humanities side to one of the CS (Computer Science) side as to why he was there, and his answer, clear to most CS students surprised the Humanities students. The reply was that without input from non-computer personnel, anything done in Computer Science is done in a vacuum – which quickly loses meaning without application.

There seemed to be a suggestion amongst the humanities people that the scientists were keeping it all to themselves.This surprises the scientists as we (and I include myself amongst the scientists) are aware of the vast quantities of information on what we do readily available to any who wish to read it.

The ‘Gulf’ within the Sciences

It should be worth noting here, that even within the sciences, there is little sharing between disciplines: Chemists may utilize Computer Vision in getting what they need from their work, as to do Biologists; however, they do not concern themselves with what was required to make the tool work, only that they get out of it what they want — often cursing the computer for messing up when things go awry. The Computer Scientist on the other hand is given a problem: how do we separate this from that in an image and then colorize it so that differentiations become clear to the user. A good example of this is when images taken of a section of the cosmos is colorized to accentuate the relevant otems from the trivial.

The Takeaway

A non-verbalized statement made was that there is a gulf between understanding on either side of this spectrum and we are here to see if we can develop channels (perhaps bridges) to span this gulf and – create a better academic world?

A Note on Programming

Programming is not Computer Science!

If anything, programming is that veneer which allows the ‘novice’ to utilize what Computer Science can offer – without needing a PhD in Computer Science!

Unlike other resources, computed power is not naturally found in the environment – even uranium and electro-magnetism are natural by-products, but computing is a totally man-made thing. Algorithms – the ‘clever’ coding – are part of Computer Science – but while we computer scientists hammer away at improvements, the world at large gets the ‘clever’ bits packaged in a way that says do this: e.g. a Sort is an algorithm taught to most junior computer scientists – however, when the programmer wishes to sort something, s/he calls the Sort() function and doesn’t think about O(n⋅log (n)).