“Literary critics do not mix with engineers.”
Shippey, T. A. (2016). Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction. United Kingdom: Liverpool University Press. p. 25
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Cloud backup in case of portable-device failure.
I’m catching up with A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. They have a guest post from James Baillie about prosopography from a few weeks ago. I did not know that prosopography has expanded from family relationships to more general connections. In fact, it seems to have crossed over into graph analysis. I hope they have taken Frank Harary’s appeal to heart and aren’t just drawing pictures, but are also using the mathematical power of a graph.
There’s interesting stuff there about medieval Georgia1, but the larger point Baillie gets across is about data-driven historical research: “a data structure or a block of code are things that make implicit and subjective arguments about how to see the world.” This is a good point, which I’ve lived in another context. In our modern world, data are everywhere. The job of combining data and synthesizing information from them employs a lot of people.
A historian has to do the reverse task as well, though. The evidence that we are given from the past is not data, pace2 the dictionary, we aren’t given data; we’re given information. We have immensely-powerful tools for processing digital data, which everyone should apply wherever they can. In order to exploit the power of data processing, though, a lot of human thought has to go into creating the database.
This is the way it used to be. The word “analysis” referred to the step where observations of the real world were cut up into data, then “synthesis” was how we reassembled the data into a theoretical framework.3 Our world of ubiquitous surveillance has greatly reduced the first step, causing us to put the lion’s share of our effort into the second. If we’re not careful we can lose sight of all the thought that needs to go into observation and analysis, and misinterpret what we’re seeing when we look at the synthesis. Good job by Baillie putting out that reminder.
I have recently made the acquaintance of a Philological Crocodile, who raises an interesting question: Are scientists really smarter than scholars of the humanities? 1 And then the crocodile chomps it to bits. As it happens, I have an opinion on this question. Fortunately, I commit neither of the sins he excoriates.
I know a lot of really smart people on both sides of the divide. The humanities scholars are better at arguing. The scientists accomplish more, so we look smarter. This appearance can be traced to one underlying fact: in the sciences we have an objective standard for what is “true”. No theory ever completely passes that test, but a lot of ideas fail it. In the humanities, nothing seems ever to be completely decided. Any theory is as good as the person arguing for it.
This has an immediate practical consequence. Those who purport to study the humanities must learn centuries of earlier work and include it in their research. A dissertation in the humanities has hundreds of pages of description of earlier thoughts on the subject, accompanied by acknowledgements or refutations. The sciences carry little of that baggage. Because a scientist can be proven incorrect or irrelevant, all the previous thinkers and researchers who have turned out to be wrong can be ignored. Therefore, the sciences can progress faster.
My dissertation; banana for scale
A visit to our Physics Department library in the 1980s gave me a lasting impression of this phenomenon. One bookcase held printed copies of all the doctoral dissertations in the history of the department. Most were about a centimeter thick. These were written by people who had made a significant original contribution to our knowledge of the natural world. A couple were 7-10 cm thick. These were dissertations for degrees in education or philosophy of science.
Mine was 133 pages long, double-spaced, and that includes the ancient tradition that figures should be on their own page and the caption on the facing page. My references were numbered 1 through 64. Can you imagine anyone getting past a humanities review committee with 64 citations? Citations to the committee-members themselves probably have to be more than that.
So that’s my resolution of the whole argument. Scientists look smarter if we’re measuring achievement, but humanities scholars look smarter when we argue with them. If the humanities had a way to prove someone definitively wrong, future researchers could ignore anyone in that category and everyone could save a lot of time. It invites speculation — what would the humanities look like, if they advanced like the sciences do?
Boethius is about to get schooled
Last year, Brenton Dickieson wrote a series of blog posts asking the question, “Why is Tolkien Scholarship Stronger than Lewis Scholarship?” The third post gives a number of hypotheses that may answer the question, but no definite conclusion was reached. The discussion in those posts, and the comments that follow them, is much better informed than I can be. However, I can always contribute to the low end of a scholarly debate.
The Idiosopher’s Razor: When several hypotheses are consistent with the evidence, the least dignified one is to be preferred.1
I’ve recently been researching criticism of Poul Anderson’s science fiction. A lot of people named “Anderson” have written books,2 which means that the first step answering any question, at the moment, is making sure I’ve got the right Anderson. It’s the literary equivalent of the “data cleaning” problem in statistics. It’s a huge part of the work in studying anything, C.S. Lewis for example. That’s a trans-disciplinary fact. And don’t even get me started about “Charles Williams”!
This is a problem that Tolkien scholars never have. Anybody writing about anyone named “Tolkien” is certain to be relevant. Looking up Tolkien is a lot easier than looking up Anderson, Lewis, or whomever. Eliminating a laborious step in the research lowers one of the barriers to getting the paper written. Applying our Razor, we can slice away many hypotheses in favor of pure laziness. Tolkien papers are easier to research, so there will be more of them, and the best of a larger group will often be better than the best of a smaller group, such as the papers about Lewis.
I think I just understood Shakespeare scholarship, too.
Lee Smith has conducted a thorough dissection of the TSA screening procedures in Rohan. (LOL) My response got too long for the text box, so I’m posting it here.
Yesterday I was listening to Tom Shippey’s lecture on “face-threatening acts” in the Signum University course Beowulf through Tolkien and vice versa. Now I have a completely different perspective on what Aragorn & the gang are doing.
Prof. Shippey is building on the sociologists’ theory of politeness as it would apply to a society “where everyone is heavily armed and more than a little bit touchy.” (The accuracy of this quote is not guaranteed because he was also talking about living in Texas and I was laughing too hard for scholarly exactitude.) The objective is to establish that you’re a member of the élite, a fighter, but one who’s not fighting anyone right now.
Shippey says that in old-germanic warrior cultures, proper etiquette upon meeting someone new is to make a threatening macho gesture to establish that you belong to the dominant warrior class, but then immediately soften it with a conciliatory compliment. Then the other party does the same, and then you can get down to business. The coast guard does this in lines 244-251 of Beowulf. In Heorot Hrothgar does the same thing from his higher status, and then everyone congratulates Beowulf on how well-spoken he is. From this point of view, the threats and boasts in Heorot are as distinct a form of courtly speech as a seduction in “Dangerous Liaisons”.
As so many scholars have noted, Háma the door-ward is basically the same role as the coast guard in Beowulf. Middle-earth is a bit more complicated, though. We have a much more diverse environment to deal with. First off, those who are neither human nor pretending to be don’t have to play the game. Legolas immediately sets down his weapons with, as Lee says, a comment that he knows Háma will take as a safety warning. (Am I wrong to infer a quiet laugh at the odd rituals of “you children”? Possibly.) Gimli just waits for the contest to be over, and then makes an ironic joke. (His axe has no more symbolism or prestige than my chainsaw.)
Now, the ones who can speak Rohirric. Aragorn has to be a jerk here (by our standards) because not only does he out-rank the door-ward, he outranks Théoden. Therefore he has to come up with a speech that’s even stronger than what the others are saying. So he satisfies the code of etiquette, but tops it off with a curse. I agree with Lee that he’s bluffing.
Gandalf does things in the reverse order to twist the system to his own advantage. He happily hands over Glamdring, showing submission. Then he commits a face-threatening act over his staff, which Wormtongue has specifically forbidden. Háma doesn’t like this, but he also doesn’t want to fight with Gandalf because he doesn’t agree with the cause. (And maybe suspects it will go badly for him.) Aragorn puts his thumb on the scale by asserting that Gandalf isn’t actually one of the warrior élite, “giving him top cover” as we say in Washington. But the balance is finally tipped when Háma thinks of an old proverb relevant to the situation. As Prof. Shippey said later in the lecture, proverbs are a great way to disclaim responsibility. And all’s well as ends better!
Perhaps you suppose this throng
Can’t keep it up all day long.
If that’s your idea, you’re wrong!
-W.S. Gilbert