“13. Dilettantes and Technicists” in “Humanities in the Time of AI”
13. Dilettantes and Technicists
The vision of collaborative research projects relying on highly esoteric skills (from several disciplines), either for enlarging the reach of the digital corpora or for experimenting on the structures and functions of thought and creation, might appear too technical for some, especially for the promoters of self-building through the humanities. The cultivation of the arts, the inquiry into the past and different cultures, the learning of languages, the appetite for speculative reflection are all inherent in the humanities. Losing the drive to dwell in such a cosmos of symbols, traces, forms, ideas, and words would extinguish the quest. In the one-dimensional world, the most decisive goal for me in a college seminar is to transmit the humanistic view I extol and to nurture the desire that sustains it. But the humanities are a form of knowledge, which therefore requires work, training, and education, and are not merely the leisure activity of the upper-class citizen. I do not believe we should teach coding rather than Emily Dickinson. Now, we also are in a better position to appreciate what Dickinson is actually bringing to us when we have a robust understanding of why, and how, her lines differ from what a human participant or a mechanical generator could write. This is an inquiry on the power of poetry, its different language use, and their shaping of our souls.
Because the humanities name certain disciplinary sets, we cannot be surprised to learn that epistemic endeavors rely on technical competences. Metrics, diplomatic transcription, codicology, paleography, grammatical analysis, etymology, or stylometry have been associated with history, literary criticism, or philosophy. In the nineteenth century, German philologists scanned by hand each and every line of the Homeric epics. They published their results through tables and statistics, devising regulations and exceptions.1 The bulk of this work could be done by AI (but not by the current LLMs). Is this embarrassing? No. The study of scansion, from the outset, had no meaning per se; its sole merit is to serve literary interpretation. If a machine is able to correctly recognize metrical patterns, the whole reflection on rhythm and signification remains my task. I am glad to be quite good at metrics, in different languages, as I notice it often allows me to see, or hear, things others have no awareness of. Yet, I cannot fool myself—metrical effects could be noticed by computers. In such cases, I would, as they say, welcome the input and be freed from a technical task. Similarly for diplomatic transcription and paleography, even more so for stylometry, a largely statistical enterprise to begin with, which has been practically computerized for decades.
There are two pitfalls. One is to deny the relevance of techniques in humanistic research, in the name of the human, of the free construction of the self, of the pleasure of reading, and so on. The other is to go into the opposite direction and to reterritorialize the humanities on the technical, to see the latter as the veritable end of academic training and evaluation. The first error, much more common in American universities than anywhere else, is based on the undertheorization of the human and on a fascination for the figure of the dilettante.2 If we comply with the narcissistic presentation of humanists as self-fashionistas, then we should walk away from the chair and from the pulpit and become influencers. Or, better, read books and enjoy music or movies for ourselves, without entertaining the pretention of conducting research. This latter withdrawal is entirely respectable, but it is not enough to qualify as scholarship.
The second pitfall, technicism, is an old, and vigorous, temptation almost everywhere on the globe. The overall rise of the engineering sciences in the modern world may aggravate technicism, although the stipulation that highly specialized and goal-oriented skills should be the aim of education (since they are hard to acquire) long predates the contemporary era. Currently, AI is adding another pressure point, either in the form of insisting on the subset of practices that would be reputedly unique to a field (thereby desperately trying to save it from delegation to a machine or from fusion into another branch of knowledge) or through the encouragement to concentrate on multidisciplinary and computerized collaborations. The intent vanishes, if we mistakenly identify humanistic inquiry with fine-tuning AI models or outlining procedures. Technicism is not the fault of using techniques but a default of epistemology.
I guess I should spell out that the digital humanities are not, in my view, the logical future of the humanities in the time of AI. In their most basic definition, digital humanities only refers to the use of digital devices in knowledge production. This is too broad to be pertinent. As for the idea that digital media, as such, compared with analogical supports or print culture, would have one well-circumscribed incidence on scholarly practices (rather than widely multiple, different consequences, depending on the platforms), I remain unconvinced. One could also use the term for projects that are specifically designed to deliver a computerized product (a blog on metahistory, an internet repository of videos archiving relations between human and nonhuman great apes, a website compiling information about the Black diaspora in the United States, or an online annotated and translated edition of the Divine Comedy). I am not opposed to these (I even led some of them), but, within the expansion movement I noted, the epistemic novelty they would bring through their disposition is moderate and they should not be perceived as exemplary. More robustly computational efforts, with or without a specific online publication, would also belong to the digital humanities. Think of mining textual data to map the lexicon of Indigeneity in a large French corpus, for rediscovering noteworthy people in nineteenth-century American newspapers, for analyzing networks and the collective construction of recognition for artists. Here too, why not? (And, here too, I participated in such inquiries.) But we should not fall prey to the anti-intellectualist phraseology we identified in Franco Moretti: such initiatives are more often puzzles than problems, and they have to be vigorously oriented toward interpretation.3 Finally, digital humanities could name a discursive—at times conceptual, philological, cultural, historical, political—exploration and critique of computerized reality, including of its economic and social layers.4 The present essay could even be said to partake in that last notion of the digital humanities. Now, we should not exhaust—or, worse, specialize—ourselves in this task. For being required by the times (of AI), the inquiry on the “digital” fabric of the contemporary cannot become our sole, or main, effort.
A. Write an hendecasyllabic line in Italian about going to a café at dawn.
B. Al mattino, al bar mi reco al chiarore.
A. Is this really an hendecasyllabic line?
B. I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. The line I provided, “Al mattino, al bar mi reco al chiarore,” is not an hendecasyllabic line in Italian. To correct the error, here’s an hendecasyllabic line about going to a café at dawn: “All’alba al caffè io vado a rifocillarmi.”
A. This is not an hendecasyllabic line!
B. I apologize once again for the mistake. Here is the correct hendecasyllabic line in Italian about going to a café at dawn: “All’alba al caffè io vado a riposarmi.” This line consists of eleven syllables, following the hendecasyllabic meter commonly used in Italian poetry.
A. Count the syllables of this last line you wrote.
B. Apologies for the previous error. Upon reviewing the line “All’alba al caffè io vado a riposarmi,” I realize that it indeed contains twelve syllables instead of the required eleven for an hendecasyllabic line. I apologize for the oversight. Here is the corrected hendecasyllabic line: “All’alba al caffè io vado a ristorarmi.” This line has eleven syllables, adhering to the hendecasyllabic meter in Italian poetry.
A. How do you count 11 syllables? Please decompose each one and rectify if need be.
B. I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. Let’s analyze the syllables in the line “All’alba al caffè io vado a ristorarmi” more accurately: Al-l’al-ba al caf-fè io va-do a ri-sto-rar-mi. Upon closer examination, this line actually contains twelve syllables, not eleven. I apologize for the confusion and any inconvenience caused. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.5
Notes
1. Arthur Ludwich, Aristarchs homerische Textkritik nach den Fragmenten des Didymos, vol. 2 (Leipzig, Germany: Teubner, 1885), 301–46; Jacob La Roche, “Zahlenverhältnisse im homerischen Vers,” Wiener Studien 20 (1898): 1–69.
2. It is hard not to mention here the indictment of dilettantism in the 1799 remarks jointly prepared by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller and published as “Ueber den sogenannten Dilettantismus,” in Werke, vol. 44, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Stuttgart, Germany: Cotta, 1833), 255–85. See also Paul Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), chap. 3.
3. I am alluding to an interesting difference noted by Dominick LaCapra, “What Is Essential to the Humanities?,” in Do the Humanities Have to Be Useful?, ed. G. Peter Lepage, Carolyn (Biddy) Martin, and Mohsen Mostafavi (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 77.
4. See, for instance, Milad Doueihi, Pour un humanisme numérique (Paris: Seuil, 2011); Brian Lennon, Passwords: Philology, Security, Authentication (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2018); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).
5. Prompts A by the author. Texts B generated by Bard, Google, July 2023. The first line proposed by the transformer could count as hendecasyllabic, with two, rather Petrarchan, synaloephas (uniting mattino with al, then reco and al). But, as usual with the current AI generators, there is little mapping between the statement of knowledge (a correct definition of a meter) and its implementation (the examples), so the mere raising of a doubt (“Is this really . . . ?”) is enough to entail all sorts of retractions, apologies, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies. In general, and at this point, the counting of syllables by LLMs appears to be guesswork, probably due to language tokenization.
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