Willard McCarty and Harold
Short
Pisa, April 2002
'In scientific research you start from two
beginnings, each of which has its own kind of authority: the observations
cannot be denied, and the fundamentals must be fitted. You must achieve a sort
of pincers maneuver.'
Gregory Bateson, Steps to
an Ecology of Mind
(Chicago, 1972): xxviii
Mapping, as we all know, is a
powerful tool for representing a complex terrain so that we can apprehend it as
a whole and quickly grasp the interrelation of its parts. A "roadmap" is of
course for going places, but prior to that, it's for seeing what the choices
are and what might be involved in getting there. Prior again to that, as recent
work in the history of mapping has argued, the making of a map takes possession
of and literally defines the mapped terrain: features are named (or re-named),
relationships shown, boundaries indicated, unknown parts labelled -- and so
marked for exploration.
The intellectual map
offered here is intended to serve the last of these roles, as a provisional
sketch of a terrain that although inhabited for the last half-century is only
now coming into our field of vision as a whole. Up to the early 1990s it seems
to have been assumed that humanities computing was to be described by
cataloguing its instantiations within the various disciplines of activity. By
then, however, it had become insuperably difficult to make any such catalogue:
too many publications, in too many disciplines, appearing in minor as well as
major places in many languages. Furthermore, the assimilation of computing into
the older disciplines meant that increasingly much of the relevant work, when
mentioned at all, had become subsumed in articles and books whose titles might
give no clue. Clearly if we are to have a view of the whole, and so a
conception of professional selves that matches our experience, a different
approach is called for. This is not to argue that the bibliographic project
should be abandoned (though it is to suggest that it needs to be rethought),
rather that we need to apply Bateson's "pincers maneuver" to our reality.
Please note: the mapping activity
instantiated here is the point rather than the map itself. It is meant to aid
the complementary move of that maneuver by giving us a means of working out in
vivid form overall conceptions of the field.
Proceed now to the map.