On Humanist, Willard McCarty recently wrote an eloquent response to the question, “Why is it that you are looking to the past when you search for answers concerning the future?”, and it’s gotten people talking.

Now the question of history and precedent is an interesting one. I very much believe in founding our current knowledge on what we’ve learned from the past. At my old school, I became very outspoken about the fact that, by fourth-year seminars, my fellow communications students still had a lack of historical understanding in their thoughts, resulting in shallowness and alarmism. For example, we’d heard the exact same arguments about email and Facebook that were raised in the face of the telegraph and telephone and haven’t stood the test of time. To be premised in the present inevitably leads to a problematic and erroneous understanding of the world. This is something that I’m sure most of academia would agree with. Yet, I feel that we do not practice it.

The overwhelming feeling that I’ve be had for years is that parts of the academic system are stuck on repeat. Tradition has impacted heavily on us, and we find ourselves continuing decades-old practises and discourses that have not affected the world in any discernible way. We believe so strongly in history, but yet we ignore when something has shown to be, in the ugliest of terms, useless to society.

I’ve repressed this opinion for a long time, until a recent chat with Kathleen got me thinking about it again. It’s the very reason for my choice to study in this field: I feel like the Digital Humanities, in it’s unfolding state, is an area where I can make a forward-moving difference. How appropriate, then, was the timing of McCarty’s post. He surprised me by addressing this directly and, taking it a step further, did so within the context of Digital Humanities.

Take text-analysis, for example. As a whole text-analysis isn’t terribly successful or satisfying, as many others in the field keep saying, and have said year after year since the early 1960s. Indeed, the postgraduate course in text-analysis that I teach is based on the question of why it is we (firmly in the present, with eyes fixed on the then present moment) run unto a metaphorical brick wall so soon after getting started; or less metaphorically, how we can get beyond the level of the individual word and individual words nearby, lemmatized or otherwise, to whatever it is that could be considered “context”; or, more philosophically, how we can possibly justify what we consider “context” to mean in any given textual situation. …

So the literary critic or textual editor, focused on interpretation of texts, doesn’t find him- or herself in a particularly good situation with respect to computing. Yet at the same time, let us say, he or she has this nagging feeling that the computer really could be useful, somehow. And, let us say, this critic, firmly in the present moment, has ideas about what went wrong and might be done about it. Isn’t it important at such a moment to know what’s been tried already? Isn’t it equally or more important to be able to extrapolate from the trajectory that text-analysis, say, has taken all these years to where now it makes sense to go?

Sure, McCarty does not directly address my concern of historical-ambivalance, but he what he does suggest with understanding is that there will emerge people with feelings like mine, not finding what they have “terribly successful or satisfying”, and extrapolating from history how to evolve past the unsuccessful models. I guess the very fact of this discourse is evidence in support of Willard McCarty’s point.