The Right Balance: On the historian's stupidity, the philosopher's hysteria, and the Importance of Digitalization in the Humanities
If you ever come across a historian of antiquities, the first impression that might pop into your mind is that 'this is not the sharpest of fellows'. The constant allusion to outdated authors and obsolete ideologies, the sometime penchant for wild claims that bear no fruit or relevance to the actual realities of our world, among other particularities will often disappoint and dismay the most enthusiastic of students. Certainly, theirs is a noble task which often consist in rendering order to old documents which may, or may not, be of historical importance: the bibliography or the historical transcription of a sixteenth century document. They faithfully labor with the hope that some day their efforts will bear some fruit of social significance. In having to laboriously mine through old records, many of which are in an unintelligible letter of a no-longer spoken linguistic variant, the mind is dulled by the sheer effort of simply gaining information rather than actively exercised by actually analyzing and manipulating such data.
On the other hand, many philosophers and social thinkers often wave hasty generalizations in the air without a second thought as to the nature of the world and society, only to wave another conclusion the next day that, upon further consideration, actually stand in direct opposition and contradiction to their previously stated claim. They have that whiff of 'hysteria' that so characterized female attacks of the nineteenth century, "sin amarres". Not being disciplined by the rigorous and formal gathering of evidence, rather than their own very particular and subjective experiences, some 'philosophers' peter dangerously close to lunacy. Given that the modern world does not provide many shared presumptions or experiences, partly the result of excessive specialization and exogenous mass migrations, philosophical discussion ends up becoming cakes of relativistic nonsense were all 'agree to disagree': Alice's mad hatter and his tea party where nothing of substance is fixed or resolved except on the agreement on what a good time was had by all.
This is why the humanities needs digitalization more than ever--an effort to give antiquities historians the critical mass for genuine contributions, as well as to give philosophically inclined thinkers material with which to construct castles 'on the ground' rather than 'in the air'. Of course, I jest with both of these groups, who do much more than what is portrayed here.
However, it makes it none the less important that digitalization be firmly implemented in the humanities--but not of contemporary authors and contemporary data but rather of 'old data' by 'old authors'.
There are millions of documents 'out there' that are simply waiting to receive the most basic of statistical analysis for what they will reveal about the societies which produced them. However, they are 'locked away' in these colonial languages which are, quite frankly, hard to access--or what is known as the study of "paleography". Basically, its a way of reading someone else's illegible handwriting. If I have trouble reading my own handwriting today, how much harder it is to read that of a person who lived 400 years ago? "Very hard" is an understatement of a process whose fruits are certainly potentially great given the vastly different social circumstances in which they lived.
This chore is so tedious, that the amount of time it would take a person to read a good 200 page book, say an afternoon, would still not be enough to have finished a five to ten page colonial document. This is tantamount to the reduction in the flow of information by twenty fold (20x), similar to a shift from 'broadband' to the old 'dial-up' 56k modems. It is a logistical morass which is difficult to overcome, in part because of the absence of financial resources needed to obtain and/or develop the necessary technologies: digital scanners, truly sophisticated optical character recognition, large arrays of storage, and fast parallel computing, of the kind used by physicists for quantum calculations for supernova explosions.
The traditional historian, who steadfastly and patiently refers to the archives on a day to day basis, prodding and poking at the available data, writing down with a pencil on his carefully collected notecards--all of which cost less than half the price of a cappuccino--will laugh at the suggestion. "Good luck with that", he would probably say.
Yes indeed. One can still dream.