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[CITATION: 1-23-2012, Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation
By STANLEY FISH
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/mind-your-ps-and-bs-the-digital-humanities-and-interpretation/]
[rev. 02-2012] Digital Humanities is Here to Stay
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| Meran |
Universities cannot ignore this today; it is bigger than post-environmental criticism or neo-colonialism, not in terms of the emotional charge of the issues, there Fish rules, but in terms of the logistics of education. It is not about justice for victims through the ages; everybody is for justice for victims through the ages. There is no conflict between social agenda of all types and working with computers.
Digital humanities has a different politics, not to be measured in terms of the standard left - right ideologies. It is about developing a web-centric, pro-open, logistically efficient work agenda with digital artifacts, without subscribing to the blanket "everything digital be free" cry of web militants. I must admit that the vehemence of partisans in that arena can only remind me of the time when my own cohort was passionately engaged. But there were more of us in the 60's and we did stress the system.
The current generations of academic workers in digital humanities seem to have the nose to the grind-stone, from my perspective, retired, sitting on a park bench with my laptop in the wifi-enabled parks of Meran feeding the squirrels. Times have changed since I became an unlikely research associate in Humanities Computing at Duke in the early 80's. It is possible that the recent legitimacy of digital humanities, still on the periphery, but paid with hard money, will yield an explosion of theory that will try to mix it up with the traditional ideologues championing various imperatives, social and intellectual.
If that should come about, I hope digital humanities will concentrate on the mathematical, statistical, and data structures aspect of the field. I would wish that competences in that area of knowledge could be grafted on what goes as traditional humanities and that statistics could find a place among all the novelties that have found a comfortable nest in the humanities in the last several decades.
The fact is that the web is still TEXT. Until some breakthroughs, we are stuck with text searching, sorting and ordering hits and retrieving texts or other media types linked to textual meta data. That work is primarily mathematical and not based on ivy tower hunches. The fact is that billions are spent by the private sector looking for new techniques and keeping the work of text analysis running. Humanities texts will not be immune because there will be CS majors writing English papers and some will get PhD's in English. Such is human perversity. There may be some theoretical types that will test the limits. I accept that; yet I do not accept that the field be measured at this early date, as Fish would have it, on the basis of a few the pioneers heading west ideologically. I do not accept, truth be told, any condescending pooh-poohing from a past master anymore than I would personally belittle Gene-culture coevolution or Psephology, just because I don't understand what these field are about and that I want a piece of their generous budget.
The fact is that there are epistemological problems in literary studies that are often ignored in the rush to do long scholarship. Time has moved on in the universities and in society. Hiring a computing humanist is no longer a mad and risky play.
On the side, the young people will not want to play by the same intellectual property rules as their parents. People that have grown up with electronic copying have a different attitude toward intellectual property than the xeroxers of a few years ago. Yet the spirit of Carnegie that created public libraries for citizens is not to be seen in the subscription-fee driven electronic walls that reserve research materials to a limited number of institutions. Jstor is just one example of many projects that extract fees from institutions and leave the free-lancers with exorbitant tolls. The young ones will run for office soon. They have produced a generation of martyrs and will start to flex muscle. Peace to Aaron Swartz.
The new hires in digital humanities will also have an impact on humanities source material, how they are presented and how will they be taught. I should think that the d-base consultants on projects chaired by scholars heavy in long scholarship today will eventual inherit those projects. Note: the term "long scholarship" (coined by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, quoted by Fish) is meant to describe research based primarily on the personal (in camera) synthesis of source materials, it is not pejorative, rather it describes the human situation to the end of the 20th century. Work on an alternative to "personal synthesis of text" followed by "rhetorical expression of descriptive analysis" is still ongoing. I find some promise in the creation of data structures that postpones the actual rhetorical expression of certainty until various data tables can be created and explored. That is electronic technology.
The pace is relentless. In 1986 at Duke, while we were installing our first 500 MB disk drive, roughly the size of a washing machine, I did say in jest that in 20 years 500 MB would be the size of a match box.
[Note: 1000 MB equals 1 GB, a 30 GB memory stick costs 80 dollars and can get lost in your briefcase for hours. Our 500 MB disk drive cost 50,000 1986 dollars and was the size of a washing machine.]
An unbelievable amount of source material can be copied to a memory stick. The question that Fish, and Grafton and Darnton force us to face is: Will the locus of scholarship still be the ancient libraries with stained glass and bound vellum, or has the locus moved to the laptop anywhere? The answer is obvious to me, scholars will move to the stained glass oak paneled rooms with their laptops if the air-conditioning is good. Will their scholarship be worthy? Only if they can learn to work on larger chunks and develop efficiencies not granted to their mentors.
There may be implications for criticism and for what sort of questions become interesting. One thought, before - 20 years ago, that working on ONE manuscript of ONE tradition would be an acceptable upper limit. For example, one would concentrate on Le Chevalier de la charrette by Chrétien de Troyes. Make the career there. But how about Erec, Cliges, Yvain, Perceval. In old time philology, it was thought presumptuous overreaching to work on all five. Digital Humanities may want to put them all into one interface and one data structure. Logistic efficiencies and a new understanding of team work may actually achieve that.
Digital humanities is about getting your digital Milton with your list of chiasmi, real or imagined, and the links to Milton's essays on church hierarchy and political structures, so you don't storm down blind alleys, into a form that you can consult in an integrated fashion, on your tablet, in the subway and at Starbucks on the way to your seminar. Much of digital humanities is non-ideological, with the caveat, that as soon as some tool or electronic corpus is ready to use, ideologues of all stripes regardless of rant, harangue or screed can do with it what they will do with it. They should experience improvement in productivity and an expanding horizon of sources independent of their nuttiness or seriousness quotient.
When you count up all the people involved in digital work in the private and public sector revolving around the basic building blocks of the humanities: text, images, sound, relationships and juxtapositions, the effort dwarfs anything undertaken by English departments and the MLA in this country, collectively speaking. Just looking at the efforts of the industry represented by Google and its competitors and the academic entities ramping up departments for text analysis and indexing research and data structure design and the math behind it; it is clear that English departments have abdicated and retreated out of the spotlight of immediate relevance.
So it is really a tour de force for a scholar in his last decade (or pardon, with all due respect, in the last few decades) before deserved walks in the park and a sunny bench for feeding the squirrels (that is where I am), to tilt against the ongoing digital representation of everything everywhere. Stanley Fish and his marked up copy of Milton will not make the web go away. That marked up Milton will not cause a legion young people to abandon their fascination with indexing algorithms. Granted, Prof. Fish has done good work over the years. There have also been adversaries who have said some hurtful things about him. I should openly admit that the accusations of subjectivism leading to sophistry were meant to hurt, but probably did not register given the scales of self-esteem.
Yet as the collective interests move on, as his positions against the mainstream, the evolving mainstream, harden, it will no longer be necessary to say hurtful things to Prof. Fish. He will take himself out of the game. The NYTimes blogs are achieving that. He will not have an impact on the field of digital humanities - although he could, still, everybody can - if they are willing to learn and do the work. The reaction of successful practitioners of digital humanities to the blogs is an embarrassed recognition that Prof. Fish does not get it, probably because he has not tried, perhaps because he has not the temperament for this kind of work. There is no effort to close departments or curtail digital projects due to Fish's misgivings.
I also understand the impulse to engage Fish and the arguments offered in the three blogs. Perhaps some digital humanists flush with theory will enjoy the jousting. I do not share the impulse. I see no premises that I could accept long enough to gallop down the list.
And here is why. The thought of any group is a continuum. The Aristotle story did not have its "Good Night Irene" moment. In order to attack the seeming lack of temporal limits of the digital (an absurd proposition right there), Fish juxtaposes the mortality of himself, the great one. But that is a Patzer move. Playing the humbly mortal move to counter the digital hubris position is mate in 2.
Through the ages, for some 2,300 years, researcher have examined Aristotle. Granted, the story ended for Aristotle in Euboea in 322 BCE (thank you wiki), but really, the story was just beginning. There may well have been peripatetics or their groupies who disapproved of analog writing, preferring analog hearing, but fortunately there have always been dissenters who wrote down what they heard. So lets just resign the "I'm a humble mortal" game started in Blog2 and move on.
Perhaps there is some jargon to make all this humility seem intellectually viable, search me; in my opinion digital work has to develop its technical vocabulary, but there is no profit in jousting with Fish's vocabulary as it seems to disintegrate. That vocabulary will find resonance or not. Digital work will also find its level. The work of the individual, or the individual and mentor, or the group, will always encounter texts. They may not be printed. They are not scratched on birch-bark either, but there will be an encounter, perhaps brilliant, perhaps sophomoric. Arguing along the lines of hubris and challenging God with timeless machines is silly. When scientists were no longer tortured for their research, that sort of argument was shelved with the thumb-screw, and trying to win such an argument today by citing a theoretical text on knowledge representation is even sillier. Still, Blog2 will go into the Fish file with a red tab.
* * *
Before I examine Prof. Fish's third blog and as some compensation for all the ugly things that have been said about him, I would like to present him a small gift, no more than a wilting flower that will be discarded the next day, a present to him and the community studying the Areopagitica.
A TYPED LIST OF ALL THE BI-LABIAL STOPS B AND P IN THE AREOPAGITICA (arranged by sentence).
PLEASE go to the blog immediately following for the list.
Nothing definitive "an sich," although the data is definitive.
Nothing monumental "per se," although the script could search other texts and compile quite a corpus of bi-labials.
Nothing for all time "as such," although the Google index should last and it would be a shame if it did not make its 15th year and then its 150th year anniversary.
Nothing "intrinsically" decisive, although I would like to jog Prof. Fish comfort level with his own subjectivity by encouraging him to look at additional data.
No real disciplinary power "in and of itself" except for the power of search algorithms to index texts, even renaissance texts.
btw. I just Googled "Hence vain deluding joys ..." the only Milton poem I ever memorized, some foolish contemporary of mine said I couldn't do it.
The gift to Fish is in the form of some output from perl scripts that format the words in the Areopagitica that contain the bi-labial stops 'b' and 'p'. The words are listed in sequential order divided along the cusps of the numbered sentences. The distance to the previous word with a bi-labial is calculated.
Below you see the selection of bi-labials followed by sentence cusp #221. - the sentence Fish quotes.
diff 53 11210 suspicious
diff 8 11218 book,
diff 7 11225 before
diff 10 11235 but
diff 5 11240 better
diff 4 11244 preaching,
diff 9 11253 except
diff 3 11256 please,
diff 3 11259 be
diff 5 11264 by
diff 2 11266 but
diff 9 11275 put
diff 6 11281 Bishops
diff 2 11283 Presbyters
diff 6 11289 both
15,120,221,XXX
b&b words, all words in sen., sen. num., cusp mark
The 15 items listed directly above are the words with "p" and "b" from sentence 221 of the Areopagitica. So class, pay attention: the word "suspicious" is the first word in sentence 221 with a bi-labial. It holds position 37. There are no bi-labials before that in sentence 221. The next bilabial comes eight words later ... and so on and so forth. But note: There are no bi-labials in the last 15 words of the previous sentence.
[Note: the diff=53 is calculated by the sum of the last words in sentence 220 that do not contain a p/b (15) and the words at the beginning of the sentence 222 that do not have a p/b (37). 15+37+plus the cusp (sorry, not worth ripping everything out to fix that) =53. q-and-d quick and dirty]
[Note: The notion of what constitutes a sentence in Milton has not been as straightforward as I had hoped. As a consequence I have had to rethink my q&d scripts along more systematic lines. Previous versions work well enough, but the new one works better and allows for easier expansion. According to the new nose count of sentences, the "B & P" sentence is now 221. The few sentence with no b&p's are now clearly marked. The new version also has some new numbers. The sentence cusps, marked XXX now list 1. the number of b&p's, 2. the number of words in the sentence and 3. the number of the sentence. The ideas is to calculate some proportions throughout the text. I feel much better now.]
The actual sentence 220 follows directly below with the bi-labials marked:
That this is not therefore the disburdning of a particular fancie, but the common grievance of all those who had prepar'd their minds and studies above the vulgar pitch to advance truth in others, and from others to entertain it, thus much may satisfie.The actual sentence 221 follows directly below with the bi-labials marked:
And in their name I shall for neither friend nor foe conceal what the generall murmur is; that if it come to inquisitioning again, and licencing, and that we are so timorous of our selvs, and so suspicious of all men, as to fear each book, and the shaking of every leaf, before we know what the contents are, if some who but of late were little better then silenc't from preaching, shall come now to silence us from reading, except what they please, it cannot be guest what is intended by som but a second tyranny over learning: and will soon put it out of controversie that Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us both name and thing.The actual sentence 222, for good measure, follows directly below with the bi-labials marked:
That those evills of Prelaty which before from five or six and twenty Sees were distributivly charg'd upon the whole people, will now light wholly upon learning, is not obscure to us: whenas now the Pastor of a small unlearned Parish, on the sudden shall be exalted Archbishop over a large dioces of books, and yet not remove, but keep his other cure too, a mysticall pluralist.Of course, coloring the bi-labials does skew the reading. Perhaps Prof. Fish has developed a case of color-graphemic synesthesia in some form that makes letters stand out, p > yellow, b > blue. Some minor form of this phenomenon could explain much. It could legitimate the wildest subjectivism since it has a physiological base. Perhaps we should get a room full of synesthetics together and have them read Milton. Of course, digital humanists could also color letters so the rest of us could experience synesthesia.
One of the nice things about facility with digital humanities is that one has easy control over the "physical" presentation of texts. There is no effort involved in counting words, counting sentences, even counting words with specific phonetic content. It is equally effortless to mark up text automatically should it be important to get a quick view of all bi-labials in a text of 18,000 words and 102,000 characters, roughly speaking, as is the case in Areopagitica. In addition, there is no ideological baggage involved in generating this kind of display, no more baggage than turning a page in Prof. Fish marked up copy of Milton.
Of course the Penn bloggers have programs that will graph the output. In my digital humanities world I have always found it important to reach back to the texts, not to the book necessarily, but to the text in a window within easy click. The computer generally only points me to some line which will still have to be reprocessed by my wetware (eye-balls & brain).
Due to his lack of experience with digital humanities and in his eagerness to smite it hip and thigh, Fish has privileged something that exists only in a few specialized labs, automatic meaning generation. It is possible to make fun of this research, but that would be bad form. Research may be nutty till it wins a prize. It is not unlike the people working on automatic driver-less cars on the road. But I think the latter have more of a chance.
Fish also likes to think that digital humanists crunch numbers before they read. To some degree that is true. I crunched the numbers once on Jacob's Room before reading it. I found a verbatim repeating paragraph; I thought I had a data-error. Then I thought it was a printing error, and I am not certain still it is not an editing error. But it clearly was a repeated paragraph. The English department was no big help at the time, not that they fell mute at the problem; I had to work out my own interpretation which would lead us too far afield. How long would it take Prof. Fish to find the two paragraphs. No doubt longer than an interpretation.
After looking what goes on in literature departments I find it cheeky to attack text miners from a miasmal pool of subjectivity. Great critics excepted. For every silly digital humanities paper, I can find 20 bad long scholarship papers. Lets not even go there. And shame for picking out a bad paper, if, in fact it is really that bad, when an extra half an hour could have been spent to find a good one. Bad ones are easier to find.
I routinely run programs to find repeating phrases of five to ten words; I look for most frequent vocabularies in various noun and verb categories. I look for the point in a text where new vocabulary enters, and I look for occurrences from the initial paragraphs spread out through the text. These techniques allow the discovery of different types of text, for example, tightly structured texts where the topic sentence is wrapped up in the last paragraph or texts of discovery where the vocabulary evolves from the beginning to the end, with new terms introduced all along. This kind of very unspectacular work can go on while doing a wetware reading, of a Gadamer or Husserl text, for example. As a companion, of course there is always an index and retrieval engine with some statistical bells and whistles.
I like to stay close to the text and have my output, at least in initial few iterations, text like. A spike in a graph is just a pointer into a text; the computer may fetch it for me, but I still have to read it or recognize it from earlier reading. The notion that this goes on without human involvement on the level of scholarship is plain uninformed nonsense. [Note: I understand that analyzing the cell phone traffic of the world is a matter on a different scale, but the principle is the same; someone will have to read the transcribed and translated text and decide what to do next.] There are any number of directions one can take this kind of formatting in literature studies. I would like to keep it at the level of formatting at present to keep Prof. Fish from constructing another straw dog to flay.
I asked the computer to count the sentences in the Areopagitica. I ask the question. I get the answer. He may ask: "Why would you want to know that?" At the very least we have found something Prof. Fish does not know. The long answer is that it is the opening to the door where ideologues and rhetorical quick-draw artists are not valued, the empirical dimension.
You unlock this door with the digital key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of mouse clicks, a dimension of easy recall of texts, a dimension of computer aided mind. You're moving into a land of both the virtual and of substance, of word lists and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Empirical Zone. [no need for a citation here]To count sentences of the Areopagitica on my personal text work bench I had to account for the odd 3 or 4 abbreviations that my program flagged as sentence cusps. Part of the general work of digital humanities should be to insure that Milton texts are presented digitally in a form that such touch-up work is not necessary.
The front matter of the Areopagitica is not formatted well so my perl program could not determine with confidence what was the actual first sentence. I may still be off a bit; in this area, high precision is not crucial; it would be were I building a bridge. It is the task of digital humanities as I see it, to make sure that electronic files of our great writers come in a form accessible to a perl or php program that I may want to throw together in a minute. The copyright advocates sense danger there. Prof. Fish would be amazed how much argument has been expended at conferences and special committees in the last three decades around such issues, and how little has actually been settled.
If he wanted to attack digital humanities, he should hit it with everything he has got on one issue: that this work is still not done for Milton. And who should this kind of work be done for if not for Milton. And who better to demand it be done than Prof. Fish. Get angry with digital humanities for wasting time. Don't pick up bad papers; professors read more of these than anything else, and get after the publishers for not pursuing this kind of work aggressively. This line of argument in action would of course require some thought on precisely how you would interlink Milton. But that is a different kettle of Pisces.
You have to hurt digital humanities where it actually can feel pain. To maintain that you base your interpretation of the Areopagitica on one and-pair that may or may not be a chiasmus is what in basketball would be called an air-ball. You may want to discredit statistical text analysis by pointing to the instrument that you carry between the ears, but digital humanities has full body armor for that kind of pseudo talk. First they will say just take a hike, write whatever you want, but stay out of our labs. Essentially the same thing Lavoisier probably would have said to latter day phlogiston hangers-on.
One more thing, Fish should be angry that there is no Milton text with all rhetorical figures marked. This really should be done for all texts into the early modern period so we can study the evolution of figures such as chiasmus from Old English, Old French and Old High German into the present. It would be a kind of study of the extinction of a species until some indexer finds a trove of chiasmi in a living Andean novelist. And I don't mean someone just going through a list of favorite texts or some 19 c. book on poetics. I mean tutti testo. Digital humanities, in the mind of this practitioner, has the task of baking all the texts of the past 1000 years into an index that is easy and transparent.
The custom programming we still have to do today with texts that are not quite easy to parse will one day soon be there for everybody. Several generations have already done dedicated work outside the usual academic reward channels. Those channels are reserved for highly paid ideologues while humanities computing techies were happy with short term soft money dribbles. No need to thank me. Towards the end I will list some of the techniques, the actual computer programs, unspectacular as they are, that do this kind of text display.
* * *
About BOLG3: Prof. Fish has reduced the straw dog he has presented us to spray. His representation of digital humanities is settling in one big heap and some small piles of threshed grain on the spot of the extended trampling.
The trampling was preceded by a sort of war dance where the professor demonstrates his weapons before the frightened digital humanists who had heard that one could learn from the great ones.
I quote the whole paragraph because the reader would think I were trying smear the professor were I to give a precis:
"[...Bishop and Presbyter...] In both names the prominent consonants are “b” and “p” and they form a chiasmic pattern: the initial consonant in “bishops” is “b”; “p” is the prominent consonant in the second syllable; the initial consonant in “presbyters” is “p” and “b” is strongly voiced at the beginning of the second syllable. The pattern of the consonants is the formal vehicle of the substantive argument, the argument that what is asserted to be different is really, if you look closely, the same. That argument is reinforced by the phonological fact that “b” and “p” are almost identical. Both are “bilabial plosives” (a class of only two members), sounds produced when the flow of air from the vocal tract is stopped by closing the lips." [Fish - 3]This kind of discursive text is not uncommon in lit. crit. Were this not from Prof. Fish, we would just roll up our eyes and check our text messages. To translate this into actual English for techies: the two consonants - similar as they are, carry the actual point that the two words, which have become technical terms in their respective churches are, in fact the same, figuratively speaking (as forces of oppressive authority). I should add, in early christian times, before bishop became an official title, the terms were considered the same, they were used interchangeably. I should add that the two offices serve roughly the same function for their flock, allowing for the differences regarding hierarchy as such. Given the mood of Milton's time, it is not completely unreasonable that both should be interested in banning books and dangerous ideas. Milton was way ahead of his time here, and hence the veneration of this text as a true corner stone of learning. If you had had training in 17c. lit, you would try to remember this bit about a chiasmus of four consonants only if you had to take an exam from Professor Fish since this is one of his hobby-horses. Someone with a long history of studying this text to the point of knowing passages by heart might think Fish were lampooning. But then, Fish went into the law to play the reasonable doubt card.
Ah, but Fish is not there to teach; he is here to menace with virtuosity and flash technique to freeze the heart with fear. The topic of the martial display is chiasmus, one of the many literary forms that has fallen out of favor in the current climate of prose heavy with information. For example, the phrase "... to [menace] with [virtuosity] and [flash technique] to [freeze the heart with fear] ..." from the sentence above, could be considered a chiasmus, albeit somewhat lacking in symmetry, but a chiasmus non-the-less. [Note: menace - fear bracket virtuosity - flash technique]. Google this for further examples.
The Fish chiasmus, of course. is phonetic. Phonetic chiasmi are known, but they are rarely, to the point of never ever, just two sounds. This is real creativity here. More typical would be: "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." "Bishops and Presbyters" seems a stretch. But that is going to be the battlefield where the Professor has chosen to cuff digital humanities. If you think he is stacking the deck, you are right. He is leading digital humanities into an argument based on authority. The argument is only wearing an itsi-bitsi bikini of "pattern." Below I hope to poke some fun at all the strange vistas chiasmus of single letters provide. Basically this is rigged; it will be about Fish's sensitivity to Milton's language, his authority. I include this bit of pre-game analysis to make sure we are all down with what is going to happen here. Sorry, we are not finished here by a long shot and you cannot get your time back.
Having learned to write in the second half of the 20th century, I tend to concentrate on streamlined grammatical rules and feel uncomfortable with prosody. The wiki article on chiasmus is acceptable. It might even be fun to try your hand at chiasmus and experiment with the power of language forms poetically shaping words joyfully not drearily spilling lines prosaically. As you can see, much nonsense can be achieved with chiasmus and near chiasmus. Also it helps to emphasize prosody over grammatical niceties.
Since chiasmus is no great cluster on the contemporary radar screen, it is not immediately obvious that the flaying of the straw dog of digital humanities will be undertaken by another straw dog, a big yellow mutt held together by string, a "phonetic chiasmus." Were I to create a straw dog to dismember I might pick an interpretation of one single solitary chiasmus (in a work of prose), a phonetic chiasmus at that, contained in two words, a chiasmus found by the one and only reader of the Areopagitica in the last few centuries, over last Christmas btw., who has found the unlikely hidden key that unlocks this piece of difficult prose.
The spectacle begins with two "and-phrases." "And-phrases" generally are innocent enough but when they occur in close proximity, they can [sear an [unprotected [neural cortex - gray matter] helplessly] char]. I have to stop this chiasmus thing.
First phrase: "Bishops and Presbyters."
Second phrase: "name and thing."
[... the role of Bishops in censoring preaching and the role of Presbyters in censoring books] "... will soon put it out of controversie that Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us both name and thing." [Milton, Areopagitica, 1642]I have no real standing to interpret this sentence aside what one picks up about the Areopagitica, about the history of church hierarchy and about nominalism or realism in the course of a life-time in universities. Yet, it looks like a good place to hook in, had I any standing, although personally I find it more interesting that a non-doctrinal conspiracy is being championed by Milton and he invites friends and enemies. I should add that a few years later Milton was given a mock funeral by his friends to throw his enemies off in their plans for a real one. So replaying the doctrinal hierarchy dispute here seems to miss the early tide and the morning breeze that will launch the Areopagitica in everyone's imagination. The hierarchy is of course the common enemy, yet the ideologues who would support the hierarchies have been invited to lay down their poisonous quills and gather around Milton. Oops, a near-interpretation.
For now, I will follow the expert.
The two and-phrases in the quote above are a distinct feature worth noticing, no doubt of general noticeability. "Bishops and Presbyters" is arguably a chiasmus of letters or sounds. A thin chiasmus, but arguable. It seems to be a fairly lonely chiasmus in the Areopagitica. If anyone has a list I would like to see it. The only other one the professor dishes up is "opposites" (there are actually two instances) some 20 sentences later. It is a syllabic chiasmus (oppo) like "Otto", not to be confused with the glyphic chiasmus like "Kyoto" or "Mississippi", which is quite common. Caution: ironic mode - grinning permitted.
Were there other chiasmi in the text Fish would have mentioned it. The chiasmus hiatus of 220 and 20 sentences is troubling. The professor does not mention this, probably because the professor cannot operate an electronic workbench for texts that counts sentences and he is, hence not aware of their relative size, nor does he have an overview of their semantic content, even phonetic content. With a small adjustment of the dials, such a tool can point to letters and sounds, even "bi-labial stops."
Yet Prof. Fish wants to keep some distance from digital humanities in his own, home-grown, spun, and knitted "... matters of statistical frequency and pattern" - whatever that may entail given the inevitable subjectivism inherent in the eyeball to brain connection. Not just subjective but inadequate in my view. He informs us of his built in biological statistical app in the first paragraph of Blog3. A semantic or phonetic inventory of the 360 odd sentences of Areopagitica would not be appropriate in his impressionistic expressionism.
The second and-phrase: "[...] the same to us both name and thing" is no doubt an attempt by Milton to insure that both sides of the nominalism debate are covered. There are both friends and enemies here. Censorship obviously trumps a distinction that might have received an extended discussion or the swinging of a cudgel in another context. A Google of "name and thing" is not without interest but would lead us too far into digital humanities proper.
An analysis of Milton's position in the debate on church hierarchies would also lead too far afield. My takeaway from this sentence is this:
1. given Milton's strong opposition to the Church of England and especially the Archbishop of Canterbury after the Bishops Wars One and Two, and
2. given his stance in favor of presbyters just before the Civil Wars,
3. given 1. and 2., it is a sign of the importance of censorship as an issue, when he declares the church hierarchy issue subordinate to the issue of censorship. He is willing to tar both with the same brush - verily they are the same in name and thing, throwing out another issue and gathering friends and enemies into the fold.
This contradicts close to five years of his publications. Thus, I am tempted to see this as ironic hyperbole (also a rhetorical form) rather than a serious ideological position poeticised into a chiasmus.
Not referring to the political debate, or the ongoing debate of contemporary church historians on this matter and the whole matter of bishops in the early church, is really a dereliction of duty, a form of lit. crit. malpractice, a form of callous neglect. It is a breach of trust to haul the whole discussion off into an orgy of phonemes. It is an innuendosis of Milton. This is not the "Law," by Jove, where anything goes as long as the case can be made. There is some duty of an expert not to mislead readers just because he can get away with it.
We are not talking about a mere Assistant Professor of English at Notre Dame (Wilkins) whom Fish takes out for a hiding, we are talking about the true legend himself (certainly in his mind). Sorry about that. This is a blog and I am not going to reread this before posting. Btw. Mathew Wilkins seems quite accomplished for his age and does not deserve to be singled out.
Despite his training at Duke, (go Heels) he seems to be doing serious research. When dealing with work outside one's field, way outside, it is best, and I offer this to all, to try to understand and if not possible, to step away from the item. If you can't say anything nice, say nothing. The world may have moved on. Suggestions have been made that I should heed this advice; not applicable here in the lower, comic genres.
I can see Fish doing the same thing to Ramsay. Ramsay is honest enough to admit he does not necessarily know everything. To Fish he is only screwing around. OK, granted, he says as much. But how is a web of commentary different from following a footnote trail, except that it is easier to follow. The work of following footnotes essentially strings an interpretation out in time. We need a web of footnotes so we can follow them not only to texts in the past (text cited) but into the future (citing texts). Exciting idea for just screwing around.
But if what Fish is doing with Milton is not screwing around, then I have never screwed around. And I can get affidavits. Fish does quote enough in his panning of Ramsay that I can guess what Ramsay is trying to do. Stark is the contrast to the last paragraph of blog3 which I honestly do not understand at all. I'll say no more. Yet, it is worth repeating since it clearly shows that there is no place for the Professor in this line of research. Good luck with all that.
But whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play. Nothing ludic in what I do or try to do. I have a lot to answer for. [Fish, 1-26-2012]]To continue on with the Milton. I can see the seductive quality of a theological chiasmus, albeit a phonetic one in distant proximity to two syllabic ones in apartness closer, (<chiasmus) followed by a reference to the names and the things in the chiasmus. NB. Fish mentions three chiasmi, all three phonetic. The two "opposites" each rate only 23%, less really, on the chiasmus scale.
Others have no doubt expended much ink and paper clearing up the three things, the two theological designations, the nominalism reference, and censorship in contentious times. But hey, what about the "names"? That Fish would pick out "names" gives me a clue that he has read the passage badly. He has perpetrated a cock up if you please [UK reading], he has put a strange feather in his hat, he is standing out conspicuously. In this ephemeral medium I can say that. He has made a mess; he has blundered.
The argument has a rough start with what amounts to a summary of Milton's phrase, which he quotes:
“Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us both name and thing.” [Milton] That is, not only are they acting similarly; their names are suspiciously alike. [Fish]What on God's green earth could he mean "names suspiciously alike." Did Milton coin the words? Is Milton picking the two words out of a long list of synonyms? Is Fish misreading Milton's phrase, "same in name and thing" as that the" names" are actually the same as in Paul and Paula of the song "Hey, Paula"?
Interior monologue, Fish processing neurally: "Could it be true that I, that I, I am the only one in the last 300 years to have spun an interpretation from the consonants in these two words. What a delicious thought - that I, me, myself - have found and angle on the Areopagitica that sets new standards for the nexus between phonetics and theology and freedom from censorship.
The paraphrase of the Milton text is not precise and allows some wiggling. Milton does not say that Bishops and Presbyters are the same. That may be an acceptable conclusion by Fish along the B++ category. What Milton says is that it will "put it out of controversie that" the two are the same. The reference to "name and thing" is the second contentious point to be put "out of controversie." The sentences before states that many in the teaching learning profession have come to him quietly, murmuring their complaints, part of their work would, of course be to stoke debates on hierarchy and on questions of realism. There were also some questions around the theological view vs the scientific view that could land one in serious trouble. Milton is announcing a truce among the intellectual set to present a united front against censorship.
This is not unlike today, when the merest hint of a tentative allusion to an oblique passing reference out of context but phonetically faintly echoing some inadvertent brush lightly against one of our taboo subjects will have you before a camera, fired, divorced, bowed head, abuse raining down from the madding crowd. Circumspection is as important today as it was in Milton's time, more important even.
Fish should be barking up two trees over, that is where the possum is.
The word "suspiciously" tells the whole story. It is going to be all about CSI English Renaissance, a crime scene littered with chiasmi. How many chiasmi are there in "suspiciously" loosely speaking? 1. sus, 2. ici, 3. su..us. Three. Then there are the bi-labial casings everywhere. How many? An orgy's worth!?
I repeat:
"...will soon put it out of controversie that Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us both name and thing. [Milton]Of all the words Milton could have used for the church officials starting with "B" and the ones starting with "P," he chose the ones with "B&P"; how suspicious is that! Milton has just called off two wars raging in the 17th c., or at least hinted to friends and foes alike that two wars could be called off to fight a new enemy, censorship; yet, Fish is still chasing his old villains.
"That is, not only are they acting similarly; their names are suspiciously alike." [Fish]
Does Fish honestly believe, after all that Milton has written about church hierarchies, that he is intrigued by the "suspicious" similarity of two words sharing four letters, a "b" "p" and two "esses." Since s and sh are both palatals they should count; they even enhance the glyphic chiasmus, grin, grin, nudge, nudge.
I give it a thumbs down.
That this sentence should lead to a lecture on p's and b's is mere rhetorical whimsy, fanciful gossamer spinning continually from the Fishian mind. I think it is screwing around in the most gracefully pointless manner, downright ludic. It is the sort of subjective pouring forth one could expect from a sophist or a happy writer. But hey, go for it. Just don't expect digital humanities to wince at the pummeling from this particular exhibition of "...matters of statistical frequency and pattern."
When Fish presents us with a list of 29 words with bi-labials, a digital humanist grading such a paper would confer a C+. Where are the spacing numbers? Where are the duplicates, and why only a partial list? Answer from Fish: these rules may apply to digital humanities laboratory exercises, but they do not apply to me, trust me on this. Question: But these numbers are easy to produce and format so everyone can understand them. Answer from Fish: I repeat, I am to be trusted on this, I am Prof. Fish and HEY, I am writing interpretive history here.
There can be no argument that the Areopagitica is against censorship. There can be no argument that Presbyters are chided. What follows is a form of nonsense that in earlier times would have been greeted with roaring applause and dignified nodding. Is he lampooning? Is he toying with us? Are we contemptible fools? It the whole p-b thing some joke on the readers of his blog? Is this contempt for the genre? It is a level of humor beyond my capacity to grasp? And "opposite" here is about the effectiveness of censorship, not about the difference of denominations. Unbelievable.
...the effort to block free expression “meets for the most part with an event utterly opposite to the end which it drives at.” The stressed word in this climactic sentence is “opposite.” Can it be an accident that a word signifying difference has two “p’s” facing and mirroring each other across the weak divide of a syllable break? Opposite superficially, but internally, where it counts, the same." [Fish 1-26-2012]Imagine this scene:
Houston we've had a problem. The bi-labial plosives point to sameness, but the operative word in the climactic sentence is "opposite." Houston please advise.
This is Houston: Say again please.
The bi-labial plosives point to sameness, but the operative word in the climactic sentence is "opposite."
This is Houston: Say again please.
It says: OPPOSITE! Not sameness, so it has been argued. There is a climactic sentence that should close the bag on this, but the operative word points to OPPOSITE!!! Houston.
This is Houston: Say again please.
We make this big play on sameness, but the big consonants are in the word OPPOSITE! OPPOSITE!!
This is Houston: Please stand by...er...stand by. Huston out.
20 minutes later...
This is Houston: We would like to try something...er...er
...a word signifying difference has two “p’s” facing and mirroring each other across the weak divide of a syllable break ... Opposite superficially, but internally, where it counts, the same. Over.
Houston, this will never work... We are beginning to tumble the wrong wayyyyyy ... Over.
This is Huston: It is simple...really...the two “p’s” facing and mirroring each other across the weak divide of a syllable break indicate sameness.
Houston @!&*%#$#@!!
This is Houston: Snap out of it! Trust us... repeat... internally, where it counts, the same.
Really, if space travel were English literature we would be vacationing on Alpa Centauri.
The fact is the text is about censorship and not another round in the church organization debate or in the nominalism debate. It is ironic that in the early church the B-officials and the P-officials were truly the same. The discussion is well documented. Over time it became important for the break-away splinters to differentiate themselves. I think Milton had his eye on the ball, he had had dealings with the Stationers' Company. It may even be that the common cause against the Stationers' Company weakened the theological contentions. Certainly, 50years later, the climate had changed.
I would entrust the p&b problem to a competent digital humanist, let some lab run the numbers and color in the letters.
While the content of the mind of Fish may bear examining, when that mind focuses on actual "things or names" in the world, the actual emphasis should be on the named things, not on the bubbling fount, bubbling since it must. If he truly wants to work with matters of statistical frequency and pattern, send Ramsay an email and let him design a real test of the proposition. More work for the professor, the hard task of building a foundation of knowledge in a new discipline. The fact that the word "humanities" is in the name "digital humanities" does not allow every land baron in humanities to speak of things beyond the horizon set by the "digital" side.
Digital humanities is not just one fish that the professor and many of the commentators on "Stanley's piece in the Times" think they have caught. Data Mining also has many forms and the Milton interpreters will have to burn some midnight electricity before they can apply the techniques of this well developed science to their few texts. "[...] matters of statistical frequency and pattern" [Fish] are taken quite seriously all over the world if not in English departments. There are dozens of textbooks to study, ladies and gentlemen.
The fact is that digital humanities is no straw dog - very serious work is done in well funded projects with serious publication schedules in fields as varied as Babylonian tablets, early Christian Codices, and Chaucer manuscripts. The projects number in the hundreds, representing the humanities A-list. The Princeton Charrette project shows what can be done with a d-base approach to rhetorical figures: adnominatio, chiasmus, oratio etc. for an Old French textual tradition. The digital humanities approach is to mark and catalog each figure and present the interpreter with a complete inventory. I assume such work seems tedious to the fast guns, awash in relativism, carried by their subjectivism, shooting from the hip.
The fiction that Prof. Fish would like to hawk is that a few charlatans who miss reading skills and acumen interpreting lack as well (<chiasmus) are fishing for ideas with algorithms. The straw dog deserving to be trampled is the boundless cheek of random eruptions of rhetorical tap-dancing wanting to pretend the New York Times is an appropriate forum for such a poorly informed and badly conceived treatment of a large multifaceted thing with the name of Digital Humanities.
Astonishing is the deference some of the commentators in the Times offer the Professor. Is it the mutual ignorance of the specific methodologies and accumulated knowledge and techniques of the named thing that makes the bond. Is it mutual enabling, co-dependence? Is it the hope that the Professor's fans have that he will be as convincing in the new field as he was when he proclaimed at various point in his career that there is no text. I have no interest in chronicling Prof. Fish wrestling with the content of humanistic artifacts. There are quite a few who have taken the trouble to give a thumbs down.
Fish or no Fish, there is plenty of text to work through to find things and plenty of images and plenty of sounds and amazingly many patterns and relationships. Fish's "p&b" demonstration on the single chiasmus in Areopagitica, in comparison, belongs on multi-grain with grape jelly into a lunch box of a precocious second year undergraduate who may or may not win a Rhodes to study 17c. prosody at the University of Brighton. Sorry, rhetoric just ran away with me, so sorry. Note to the rest of the world: p&b peanut butter, actually, pp&j, peanut butter and jelly.
This is really the extent of my outrage. I will neither denounce (nor refute either will I) the rest of the Professor's presentation. The fact is that interpretation is part of digital humanities, so is long scholarship, so is digital logistics. It is not helpful to find interpretations wanting; and the flotsam and jetsam that Fish generates should be indexed along with everything else that he has written that is great. Other cohorts will judge the usefulness. Interpretations can age; they can be just plain wrong, or they can be steps to better interpretations. Russell said that every advance of science was achieved by destroying some orthodoxy of Aristotle. Good point, but achieving a plausible orthodoxy was still a huge step.
Prof. Fish is doing himself no favors with his reading of digital humanities; it is always painful to encounter lack of substance; it tends to spill over. It is sophomoric to portray the readers of his piece as unwilling or too impatient or incapable too (<chiasmus) to follow his arguments. We can follow them well enough, thank you very much indeed; would that they went somewhere. Would that they were more than a small selection of words containing the letters b and p.
Someone should really come down on his paragraph where he informs us that there are 26 letters in the alphabet, and only he can find the patterns "designed" by the author. Where can we start to help this man? I am reminded of Galileo's gardener Abbondanzio Abundius who would often say: "I see it going up over there in the morning and I see it going down over there (pointing other direction) in the evening. What am I supposed to think?"
No one will deny that Prof. Fish can spot a pattern real or imagined. I would like to submit respectfully that there are many patterns in nature not visible to the human eye. Scientists have developed apparatus to overcome the insufficiency of eye-balling. Linguists will tell you the same thing about texts. I can personally vouch for many philosophy texts. The pseudoness of his methodology is shocking:
The direction of my inferences is critical: first the interpretive hypothesis and then the formal pattern, which attains the status of noticeability only because an interpretation already in place is picking it out. [Fish]Fish has no awareness of his intentionality and the need for countermeasures. He will have it all, the hypothesis and the proof all rolled into one.
What is the substantive proposition?
"Milton believes that those who suffered under the tyrannical censorship of episcopal priests have turned into their oppressors despite apparent differences in worship and church structure ..." [Fish]I find this imprecise. Episcopal Bishops enjoined Presbyters from preaching. Presbyterians having cast off the yoke now would like to issue lists of approved and forbidden books. The advent of printing made that possible. It had lead to organizations such as the Stationers' Company that provided censorship services to the state and the church.
Copyright, invented in Venice was clearly designed early on to get a grip on this dangerous medium, print. Before print, labor intensive copies had to be produced at significant cost. No need for censorship.
For a substantive proposition more is required, more than the terms "tyrannical" and "oppressors." The phrase; "despite apparent differences" is just gratuitous verbiage.
The fact is that the "us" in "silence us from reading" means that this is about learning, which Prof. Fish emphasizes, and it is about what the Stationers' Company would publish, and it was his cooperation with Locke among many other factors that eventually caused the lapse of the Licensing Act fifty years later, granted a long time, but Parliament was busy, there were other fish to fry.
I have no real objection to finding phonetic patterns. I find objectionable, ignorant even, to argue against digital searching. Especially when it is easy and definitive. As an aside, does the law professor Fish touch the Lexis keyboard or is he strictly concerned with the rhetorical side of the law. If he does, is he searching to find "something" or does he only search when he knows what he is searching. Not really searching then, is it? Nothing to search if you already know.
His substantive proposition was two words. This leads to a random whim to think: Chiasmus! The only other thing that turned up was one word "opposites" in a stern lecture by Milton directed at Presbyterians.
So just give the straw dog a couple of whacks. One could reply, first you take a screwdriver and then you open the box to see what is inside. The screwdriver is merely to open the box, to see how many sentences, or how many words with p&b may be inside. You may also shake the box; that is one method. Or you may poke a hole in it and peer in. Or one can just stay in the discrete situation and effuse.
Prof. Fish indicts:
The direction is the reverse in the digital humanities: first you run the numbers, and then you see if they prompt an interpretive hypothesis. The method, if it can be called that, is dictated by the capability of the tool. [Fish]Even it that were true, and it certainly was true decades ago when we all wondered where computers would eventually take us. It is less true today. There are legitimate empirical techniques, there are statistical tests, sciences use them every day. I certainly trust the geeks at UVA to present Prof Fish with a pretty comprehensive analysis of bi-labials in the texts written around the time of the Areopagitica; it would even be a bit of cross-disciplinary science.
I would take it on, but honestly I have already overspent my time on this. The laughs are diminishing.
Still, here comes my advice. In an attempt to be helpful, I have spent a little time to sketch out the "p&b" folly from a digital perspective. First, forget the certainty engendered by the quick inspired glance. Forget the certainty required to claim the prize of originality in a field well plowed and planted and trodden for decades running into centuries. Let us stay humble and let the computer gather some preliminary facts, nicely presented. It is assumed the text of the Areopagitica has been read and the outline of the general points been grasped. I may need some more time on this part.
Let me start with the result of an hour's work or a bit more, following the inevitable tangents and the re-thinking.
A treatment would read like this: I want all words containing the letters "p" and "b" identified with their sequential position in the text of Areopagitica, delimited by the numbered sentence in which they appear and with the distance between appearances clearly indicated. Also, give me the words containing more than on bi-labial. Also give me the ratio of bi-labials to the words in a sentence. The span is from 31% to 0. And sort that numerically. And make a graph of the fractions in sentence order. And scale it if it is hard to read. And lets unpack some statistical tests and see if some anomalies crop up compared to contemporaneous texts by Milton.
A sample of the output around the position in the text Prof. Fish selected for his "interpretation." The complete output file, of course, covers every one of the 360 odd sentences. I just grabbed a handful here.
I may have to work some more on these numbers, although they are probably good enough for this strange adventure chase.
.
.
.
diff 8 11011, disburdning
diff 3 11014, particular
diff 2 11016, but
diff 9 11025, prepar'd
diff 5 11030, above
diff 3 11033, pitch
6,44,220,XXX
diff 53 11086, suspicious
diff 8 11094, book,
diff 7 11101, before
diff 10 11111, but
diff 5 11116, better
diff 4 11120, preaching,
diff 9 11129, except
diff 3 11132, please,
diff 3 11135, be
diff 5 11140, by
diff 2 11142, but
diff 9 11151, put
diff 6 11157, Bishops
diff 2 11159, Presbyters
diff 6 11165, both
15,120,221,XXX
diff 8 11173, Prelaty
diff 2 11175, before
diff 9 11184, distributivly
diff 2 11186, upon
diff 3 11189, people,
diff 5 11194, upon
diff 4 11198, obscure
diff 6 11204, Pastor
diff 5 11209, Parish,
diff 5 11214,be
diff 2 11216, Archbishop
diff 6 11222, books,
diff 5 11227, but
diff 1 11228, keep
diff 7 11235, pluralist.
15,67,222,XXX
diff 3 11238, but
diff 11 11249, Batchelor
diff 9 11258, simplest
diff 1 11259, Parishioner,
diff 7 11266, privat
diff 3 11269, both
diff 6 11275, books
diff 2 11277, ablest
8,46,223,XXX
.
.
.
The output file shows all words of the Areopagitica with the sequential number in the text as well as the distance to the p&b word above. Low numbers mean close proximity large numbers the opposite. In addition, sentence cusps are marked and numbered. Of course once this level of display is reached (e.g. sequential position, a quantified measure of the distance, and a division into sentences) many other question could be asked.
Yet I am satisfied that in the case of the p & b in Areopagitica, there is no there there in my reading. I do have a problem with prose from that time. I once did a large project on Shelton's Cervantes translations and found the changes of the English language every decade to be maddening. Proofreading before standardized spelling tempts one to propose radical solutions for Elizabethan philology.
The next post will have the less than 3000 words with p&b of the total 18,000 or more lexical items.
