The honourable, the venerable and esteemed chancellor of vice sent us these nuggets of wisdom from deep within his fortified ivory tower:
'The quantification of the humanities is driven by an inexorable logic: digitization breeds numbers; numbers demand statistics.'
--New York Times.
(And I thought the British press was crap)
In case you missed it, here's the dope:
'A vast enterprise that aims to digitize our cultural heritage, put it online for all to see...the transformation of the humanities into a science.'
But could there be another logic at play here, one that has totally escaped us?
'The digital humanities have captured the imaginations of funders and university administrators.'
Now you're talking, amigo.
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'In the world I know about, the world of books and publishing and bookselling, it used to be the case that a publisher would read a book and like it and publish it. They’d back their judgement on the quality of the book and their feeling about whether the author had more books in him or in her, and sometimes the book would sell lots of copies and sometimes it wouldn’t, but that didn’t much matter because they knew it took three or four books before an author really found his or her voice and got the attention of the public...
It was a human occupation run by human beings. It was about books, and people were in publishing or bookselling because they believed that books were the expression of the human spirit, vessels of delight or of consolation or enlightenment.'
But when did it begin, this idea that profit is the only measure of worth? Where did this mean spirit come from? Chicago, Kirkcaldy? What is it but
'the tendency to look for extreme solutions, absolute truths, abstract answers. All fanatics and fundamentalists share this tendency,...'
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Andre Gorz:
5 comments:
This is remarkable.
For the first ten minutes or so, I was imagining this to be a brilliant private library, kept in a hidden closet behind a false wall-panel in a mysterious old house hidden away on a back street of Lahore.
Then I realized I was, in fact, in Holmesbury Close, Hive Road, Bushey Heath, Herts.
Moments later it occurred to me I might well be in... of all places... Error.
Great fun all the same, the seven old orange Penguins, and the nine old blue Penguins, representing both the aquamarine and the cerulean (possibly later printings, or jacket fading?).
Back when books were books & c., often with actual stuff in 'em, to boot.
Hello, Tom!
I don't know where this is from but it did strike me as beautiful, peaceful.
Bushey! What were you doing there? (It's okay, you don't have to answer). I had very close family in Watford.
I hardly ever see those Penguins nowadays. There's an old second-hand bookstore on Charing Cross Road (Henry Pordes) but apart from that...
billoo,
Sorry about that -- it's just that that bookseller in Hertfordshire, who seemingly mounted that beautiful wall of books, has given his business the same name that appears in the URL of your blog, and... you get the picture.
And/but the mystery deepens -- the mystery of my dementia perhaps? -- when I discover that this post, which appeared to have no text when I visited yesterday, now has a text, and an extremely interesting text at that.
You are a high-minded soul, so I won't include you in this blanket of generalization, but I fear that the mean profiteering spirit to which you refer now seems the universal and acceptable way of things.
But what I really mean is the universal and acceptable way of things in the West, where, some of the time, as it appears, you are not.
I'm not sure distance lends enchantment to the view, as the ancient platitude has it, but I'm pretty certain it does add at least a pinch of objectivity.
Yes, sorry about that Tom. There was no text initially. It's just the way I sometimes put the posts together.
Salams,
b.
Nothing to be sorry about!
I think that's a beautiful way to post, in stages.
Everything about this post has been thought-provoking.
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