Computing in the Humanities - Servant or Partner?

The term humanities computing evokes two images of relationship: one in which computing is the servant, the other in which it is a partner. To traditional humanists computing-as-servant is unproblematic — who does not wish to be served? But the more challenging notion of computing-as-partner promises the greater intellectual rewards. This paper proposes Empirical Modelling as the basis for a new vision of human computing through which a strong and fruitful partnership can be built.

Humanities and computing in partnership?

When we trouble to take a close look, rather than simply to relegate computing below stairs, its relationship to the humanities seems deeply troubling: on the one hand, flawless manipulation of data; on the other, contingent interpretation. We are reminded of the familiar two culturescaricature of the relationship between arts and science (cf. Collini in Snow). Unfortunately, the majority view of computer science (CS) sits comfortably alongside this popular caricature. At the theoretical end, where the designation science best fits, CS describes formal, objective meaning as a computational recipe. But at the practical end, where application programming is done, CS faces the fourth decade of a messy software crisis. Uncertain human situations, including scholarly ones, have not meshed well with the science. Hence the quite separate concerns of theoreticians and practitioners within the field. New trends in computing subvert their separation, however. The manner in which data is represented and presented to the scholar is now open to negotiation, and it has become clear that different modes and technologies for presentation have significant cognitive implications. Neither the programmer nor the scholar is well-adapted to cope with this state of affairs.

Modern developments in practical computing present a serious challenge to computer science as it is currently understood. The sharply differentiated treatment of formal and informal meanings of programs is oriented towards applications in which mathematics plays a central role. This traditional view of computation made good sense in its historical context, when the archetypal role for the computer was "automating routine processes". As Brian Cantwell Smith has argued in (Smith 1987, Smith 2002), a foundation for computation in logic may suit programs with a preconceived abstract functionality but is not well-adapted for dealing with the relationships between form and content encountered in modern computing practice. Through its capacity to generate rich experiences, the computer can liberate the imagination, and in principle suggest fertile new modes of interaction that defy preconception.

In acknowledging and exploiting the semantic impact of holistic experience, computing practice has made a transition that our science of computing has not. Trying to give a mathematical account of computing is like trying to account for musical experience solely by music theory. This motivates us to reappraise computing from a totally different perspective in which experience rather than logic has a privileged role.

The objections to this reorientation centre on perceived fundamental distinctions between kinds of experience. In commonsense thinking about computing and the humanities, for instance, we distinguish experience of physical reality, experience of the virtual world, experience that can be communicated — formally or informally — through language, experience that can be authenticated by scholarship or experiment, and affective experience such as is associated with the appreciation of works of art. Attributing an absolute status to these distinctions endorses the familiar fractured caricature of the relationship between sciences and arts, at the ends of a spectrum of experience leading from the material world to the miraculous. Both computing and the humanities have made significant intellectual and practical contributions to challenging the status of these distinctions. Consider, for instance, the ontological issues addressed by Goodingin his discussion of the status of virtual experiments in science, and the analysis of poetic treatments of the metaphysical and the material in Heaney. The alternative vision for computing endorsed by Empirical Modellingis rooted in a philosophical position proposed by William James where the distinctions between different varieties of experience are taken to be no more or less than matters of classification (James). This is potentially significant both in respect of aligning the science of computing with its practice, and in negotiating — and perhaps in due course, consummating — the marriage of humanities and computing.

Human Computing and Empirical Modelling

This section takes up the idea of reappraising computing from a perspective in which experience rather than logic plays a privileged role. This involves turning from the relationship between computing and the humanities as disciplines to consider the more concrete relationship between humans and computers.

Through their enormous flexibility and power, and the ethereal medium of electronics, computers have greatly extended the machine metaphor. The activity of programming allows us to make new machines of extraordinary range and variety. A widespread view compatible with this metaphor sees the computer characteristically as an information processor. Underlying such a machine computing outlook the role of logic is central from the specification to the verification of both programs and hardware.

There is, however, a perspective on computers and their use that is independent of the machine metaphor and more fundamental. It has always been present in computing but has been so over-shadowed by the viewpoint, and usefulness, of machine computing that it has often been overlooked.

Before making any use of the computer I need to be able to relate what I see and do on the computer with my situation in my own world outside the computer. For this I must be able to present a part of my world, or some phenomenon, on the computer in a recognisable fashion. When this is a matter of using the computer in a machine mode (e.g. for e-mail or word-processing) this act of representation is very familiar. But it is now possible to make computer models with which we can deliberately dwell upon our personal understanding of something of interest for its own sake, and without any functional use yet in mind.

This role for the computer of building artefacts with which to think and explore has been facilitated by the improving technological management of the electronic medium. This has become, like paint, or music or language, a medium for self-expression. The fluidity and flexibility of the medium make it a potential match for close integration with the stuff of human thought and perception.

The contrast then, with the machine mode of the computer, is the capacity of computer artefacts to offer us direct, felt experience of parts of our own worlds. It is a likeness established through the correspondence between the experiences, on the one hand, of interacting with our world, and on the other hand, of interacting with the artefact. It is this emphasis on the way computer artefacts may be experienced as if for the first time, then explored and developed before definite meanings have emerged, that is the essence of what we mean by human computing. Computer artefacts themselves now become a significant source of experience, and — especially in terms of the quality of experiential interaction — they may even be offering us a new kind of experience.

Some of the early pioneers of electronic computing had a vision not unlike that of human computing. For example, many of the sentiments of the enthusiasts for electronic analogue computing (Small) resonate strongly with our ideas, and Licklider looked forward to a time when "men and computers would work in intimate association." But in the 1960's the technology made any such use of computers very difficult. Since then spreadsheets have been the most successful software to embody the idea of human computing. It has, however, been the explicit aim of the Empirical Modelling (EM) project at Warwick to develop principles and tools that give priority to experience rather than logic, and that promote the integration between human and computer processes that is at the heart of our vision for human computing.

The Empirical Modelling Project has been pioneered and led by Meurig Beynon at Warwick for over fifteen years. The work has been taken forward in large measure by many cohorts of third-year project students and many research students. The overall guiding principle has been the development of computer artefacts that offer similar experiences, through interaction, to those in some part of the modeller's own world. Fundamental practical concepts that have shaped the principles and the model-building tools are those of observable, dependency and agency. The characteristic activity of EM is the experimental identification of relevant observables associated with some phenomenon and of reliable patterns of dependency and agency among these observables. It is a modelling process that is more primitive than, and so prior to, the commitments inherent in programming. The approach is a broad one having relevance across the whole spectrum of computing. We shall introduce the ideas of definitive scripts and agent-oriented modelling by means of a small example and demonstration, and will give an overview of the on-line material available on EM (EM-website).