Atomic Bomb Markers in your Body

 (Part of the Great Tab Cleanup)

A BBC report on how bodily radioactivity documents the anthropocene.

What about all these Stories? Rereading Schank

In the aftermath of the civil disturbances of Charlottesville, Michael Eric Dyson wrote in the August 12th, 2017 edition of the New York Times:

Such an ungainly assembly of white supremacists rides herd on political memory. Their resentment of the removal of public symbols of the Confederate past — the genesis of this weekend’s rally — is fueled by revisionist history. They fancy themselves the victims of the so-called politically correct assault on American democracy, a false narrative that helped propel Mr. Trump to victory. Each feeds on the same demented lies about race and justice that corrupt true democracy and erode real liberty.

Dyson then distinguishes between political memories, between revisionist history and other history (proper? academic? he has no name for it, but cites Du Bois), between true and false narratives.

Tools of Story Telling

It is in this context relevant to look at the infrastructure that Roger Schank has identified for story telling (bracketing Schank's occupation with intelligence, however). Because of his particular slant to story analysis, Schank provides a repertoire of narratological tools and distinctions that differ from those in the literary toolkit. (This cuts both ways, Morson argues in the Foreword, missing for example the notion of Genre in Schank's musings, p.xxff.)

Stories are received and generated structures that people label in an attempt to index them, so that they can retrieve them and match them for comparison purposes. People are assisted in story manipulation by story skeletons, which give a basic direction to a narrative, and by the hierarchy of scripts, plans, goals and themes that Schank had identified in his classical work with Robert Abelson (1977). Because stories can be retold in a variety of ways and for various purposes, Schank posits that they are remembered in a different format, the gist, of which the individual retelling is a production. Stories vary by culture and subculture---Schank specifically discusses the French restaurant on the one hand and the teenager Rock fan on the other.

In much of the exposition of the book, and especially in the discussion of the story production and generation, Schank brackets the question of truth. Schank writes as if the intentionality of the stories would make the question of whether the stories are true or not irrelevant or even impossible to answer.

Diplomatic Incidents

Schank uses a diplomatic conflict, the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US Navy warship, the Vincennes, on July 3, 1988, to illustrate the way that the same event is used to make hay for the divergent political positions.

If we construct our own version of truth by reliance upon skeleton stories, two people can know exactly the same facts but construct a story that relays those facts in very different ways. (p.152)

Or even more patronizingly:

The real problem in using skeletons whis way is that the storytellers usually believe what they themselves are saying. Authors construct their own reality by finding the events that fit the skeleton convenient for them to believe. They enter a storytelling situation wanting to tell a certain kind of story and only then worrying about whether || the facts fit onto the bones of the skeleton that they have previously chosen. (p.154f)

Schank then goes on to label the skeletal stories that backed the reactions of the various government as the US using the understandable tragedy (p.152f), Great Britain the justifiability of self-defense (p.153),  Libya insolence and state terrorism (p.154),  and Bahrain justifiable bad effects of war on the aggressor and moral courage (p.155).

So, we can summarize as a first impression that, while Schank will admit that some facts do not fit onto the bones of a skeleton, he is willing to talk about people's own realities and how the skeleton stories are what make up people's notions of truth.

... no matter what happens next, all the viewers of the play [that plays out in the international diplomatic incident, RCK] will retell the story according to the skeletons they have already selected; i.e. they will probably not be moved to reinterpret any new event in terms of some skeleton that they do not already have in mind. (p.158)

So even though the stories dominate to the point of where they shape the memory of the events and the way that future facts will attach to past narrations, there is still something that Schank can call coherence.

One of the oddities of story-based understanding is that people have difficulty making decisions if they know they will have trouble constructing a coherent story to explain their decision. (p.159)

So justificatory stories do have coherence requirements, otherwise they will not properly support the decisions through explanations. Schank goes on to demonstrate this with divorce stories (pp.160ff), which however need not concern us here.

Stories that were Challenged

While there is much plausibility to the fact that political agents have apriori decided how participants will respond to events in the arena that is international diplomacy---theorizing, as Sherlock Holmes would warn us, in advance of the facts (p.159), matters become more complicated when Schank looks at stories that were strongly challenged by agents able to do something about disagreement.

Schank discusses this problem in two examples, in the claimed rape of Tawana Brawley by white supremacists (pp.208ff) and the disqualification of Canadian runner Ben Johnson (pp.210ff) for allegations of doping. However, the larger context is the problem of the cultural and subcultural specificity of stories, and how to acquire that skill (pp.189-218). As a result, the analysis of these stories that were challenged (and ultimately rejected) by authoritative agents come across as situations of choosing bad raw materials for story telling on part of Brawley and Johnson.

Tawana Brawley

... Tawana Brawley ran away for four days, and she needed to tell a story. For her own reasons, she decided not to tell the true story of where she had been, but to invent one instead. (p.209)

It is easy to agree with Schank here, though one has to emphasize that he distinguishes between "true story" and "invend(ed) one" explicitly.

Schank then continues:

When we invent a story in order to mislead people, we try to figure out the story that they want to hear, and we tell it. Children frequently tell a he made me do it story or an it wasn't me that did it story when they are caught having done something wrong. And this kind of story is what Tawana Brawley told too. (p.209)

Again, we are on the same page as Shank here. But then Schank takes a departure that is interesting for the problem of reliability.

Her [Tawana Brawley's, RCK] problem was selecting a believable story. She failed to assess how many listeners would hear her story and failed to understand that what each of them wanted to hear was quite different. (p.209)

Even with the discussion of enculturation into story cultures and subcultures and the difficulties for teenagers to acquire these skills going before (p.208), the turn here is unexpected. The problem according to Schank at this point is not that too many listeners would eventually exhaust Tawana's range of fictional supports, but that they story expectations would eventually exceed her capabilities in some other way.

Schank argues that Brawley picked two basic skeletons, both shockingly realistic in 1980s America ( and as Dyson might remind us, even in 2017), namely young girl is kidnapped and raped as well as young black is victim of racial attack (p.209). Crucially for Schank's argument, the first one comes from the general American culture, and the second one from Brawley's subculture (p.209).

While either of these standard stories is bad enough, the combination of them produced something we can only assume Tawana had not counted on---the match of two types of stories || sought by the news media and black activists. (pp.209f)

Schank then discusses these two groups in turn:

The media looks for horrifying stories involving assaults on especially innocent people. Consequently, Tawana's story matched a skeleton story that news people are always looking to report. (p.210)

Her [i.e. Tawana Brawley's, RCK] story also matched a skeleton story that black activists are always on the lookout for: innocent blacks as easy victims of white officials. She had added that her rapists were state police officers and other officials of her area. The factor, of course, had it been true, should well have caused alarm on the part of the activists. (p.210)

Schank is entirely plausible in identifying the activation patterns for various groups' involvement, and the in arguing that Brawley did not understand how her chosen skeletons meshed with these activation skeletons. But even here, Schank is willing to admit that there are true stories of innocent blacks as victims---"had it been true" (p.210)---that activists should be alarmed by.

Tawana's mistake, apart from fabricating events in the first place, was to invent stories without understanding the standard nature of the stories that others look for. (p.210)

There are a polite and a critical reading to this sentence. The admission, and as an aside only, that "fabricating events in the first place" was a mistake either is Schank's backdoor to admit that the events matter (this is the polite reading) or an indication of his lack of appreciation for how much events matter (the critical reading), i.e. that Brawley's failure to grasp "the standard nature of stories" (p.210) pale to the point of irrelevance in comparison with the need to fabricate facts that could hold up to the scrutiny of multiple organizations.

It is thus with much less agreement than previously, or with a feeling of the emphasis lying on the wrong part, that we head into the description of the role of the standard nature of stories.

Thus, when doctors are handed a rape case or a case of unconsciousness from beating and deprivation, they have certain tests they perform to aid the victim. They also use skeleton stories to understand such cases, and they seek to fit the details of any new story into the familiar story. (p.210)

This  is just an adapted restating of Schank's general epistemology that understanding in humans is story-based.

Similarly, the police know a story about rape, and in the case of Tawana Brawley, they tried to fit the details of her story into theirs. (p.210)

As a result of casting the problem in this way, Schank posits that the police became suspicious because of the mismatch between Tawana's story and their expected story.

For both the doctors and the police, Tawan's story did not agree with the standard stories about rape, and this disparity caused them to question the truth of Tawana's claims. (p.210)

Notice that the whole problem of truth---now however applied to claims, not to facts or events or stories---is admitted and raised by Schank. Yet his conclusion is cast in terms of story skeletons and of subcultures:

Not surprisingly, since she is young and rather unsophisticated, Tawana Brawley failed to understand how to make up a story that matched the ones that the people who were listening to her expected to hear. She did not know the stories of the other subcultures. (p.210)

And almost wistfully, Schank concludes:

Traveling across cultures, it seems, requires the help of a translator. (p.210)

Perhaps a stronger stance that Schank could have taken was to recur on his prior notion of scripts. Tawana failed, because she did not really understand the rape script and the deprivation script, and was therefore unable to tell stories that matched well enough with the script that the doctors and the police officers had for these incidents.

Furthermore, as the New York Times article that Schank quotes (pp.208f) suggests, while the doctors and the police officers took their departure from their questioning the validity of the story, they did not condemn her on that account but used it to find actual evidence that contradicted Tawana's narrative. Notice the use of the word "evidence" in the cited article:

The conclusion that Miss Brawley fabricated her story is supported by ... evidence that she ran away and spent much of the next four days at her former apartment, evidence that she concocted the condition in which she was found, and evidence that she tried to mislead the police, doctors and others about what had happened to her.  --New York Times, September 27, 1988, cited in: Schank 1990, (p.209)

In fact, the article, a two-page spread as Schank admits (p.208), was called "Evidence points to Deceit by Brawley".

Even granted all the usual caveats of the mutual interaction between evidence and narrative, it seems hard to support the stance that for Miss Brawley, the story skeletons did her in. At best they tipped the police off to problems. And the failure in the collection of confirming evidence, which would have been required equally for a court of law, would have done her in just as much as the success in finding fabricated evidence.

Canadian Runner Ben Johnson

Schank of course believes that he has proven that Brawley became entrapped by being unfamiliar with the story expectations. Thus he can use the case of Ben Johnson, a Canadian runner disqualified from the Olympics for doping, as "another case of story misunderstanding" (p.210). 

The story is interesting in this context because the press assumed that everyone who used steroids also knows how to avoid getting caught. (p.211)

Schank's quotes from the NY Times actually do not bear this statement out. It is Dr Voy, the chief medical officer of the US Olympic Committee is the one that is quoted as commenting on the masking know-how in the athletes community.

Schank then goes on to enumerate the stories that Dr Voy, the physician and official, has---to wit: the miscalculate the dose, the screwy system, and the reckless gamble story, the panic to insure victory story and the masking the drug story (p.211)---as well as the stories that Johnson was familiar with---to wit: spiked my drink with drugs and bad lab test (p.211).

The first thing to notice is that Voy's and Johnson's narrative intentions are at odds. None of Dr Voy's stories would have gotten Johnson a pass for testing positive. Indeed, the article gives no examples of stories that Dr Voy would have considered legitimate for a positive testing candidate to continue on as a medal bearer. So Johnson could not have used any of these stories. In fact, all we learn is that the stories Johnson alleged were not part of Dr Voy's repertoire of acceptable excuses; that set may have been empty. If there was no story for Johnson to choose, then Schank's comment, that "in essence, the only thinking we have here is the selection of stories" (p.211), is puzzling in the extreme.

Summary

Though Schank at times sounds as if he is flirting with both sides of the relativism divide, this effect is produced partially by sloppy wording and partially by not distinguishing the following points correctly:

1. Even if skeletal stories are hard to disprove because of their intentionality, which functions as a political stance does, their are notions of quality of match that can lead to not selecting them.
2. Stories include factual information and can be challenged much more readily along that dimension. Admittedly, facts may themselves be the outcome of stories (a topic that Schank unfortunately bypasses), and facts have some of the same subcultural aspects that Schank identified for the stories (e.g. water-logged dinosaurs supporting a Biblical flood narrative) as to acceptability and validity.
3. Though it may not be possible to show that some stories are true, it is sufficient to be able to show that some stories are false for historiography to have the ability to stem the flood of politically-charged revisionist history. Tawana Brawley's story for sure and possibly Ben Johnson's story as well (Schank's source material is too terse) are stories that are false, due to the evidence found, not the skeletons chosen.

It is possible that Schank's side-stepping of the question of truth is due to his general goal of moving AI work from theorem proving and expert systems (p.xlii) toward story generation / understanding / summarization and explanation.

If we take a step back and look at the larger sources of information available for the examples that Schank uses, such as the Admiral Fogarty report from August 1988 or the investigative research journalism by the New York Times reporters Robert McFadden et al, Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax, from August 1990,  we get the suspicion that Schank is used in the small forms, such as the newspaper article, not the hundred-plus pages slugfest of details that Fogarty or McFadden and their collaborators provided with.

Postscriptum

In an amusing twist, the McFadden's book Outrage, published contemporaneously with Schank's book in 1990, possibly even contradicts the sequence of events claimed by Schank. 

Later, Dr [Alice, RCK] Pena [the emergency room physician, cf. p20, RCK] had her put her feet into stirrups for an examination of the vaginal, rectal and pelvic areas. The examination revealed no cuts, dried blood, bruises, swelling, deep redness, or other indications of injury. There were no signs of trauma to the mouth …. Indeed, the girl’s [Tawana Brawley’s, RCK] teeth were surprisingly clean and her mouth did not even have a bad odor. Dr Pena decided to forego the use of a rape-detection kit, at least for a while. There weren’t enough signs to warrant it …. (p.21)

At this point, with Tawana still giving signs of semi-consciousness (p.17), and had hardly launched into a story of the type that Schank is looking for. Already the initial interaction with the paramedics and the emergency room physician was gathering evidence against the narrative that Tawana was planning or had been told to use.

Bibliographic Record

Roger C. Schank, Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence,  Evanston, IL (Northwestern University Press), 1995 (= reprint of the 1990 edition published in New York (Scribner), 1990; with a foreword of Gary Saul Morson, from 1995). [Google Book Selections]

Some notes on Corpus Linguistics and their Criticism

My friend Paige Morgan, Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Miami, recently suggested Laurence Anthony's tool AntConc for corpus linguistic analysis that is well supported and straightforward to accomplish thanks to online tutorials and YouTube videos, some of them even by the maintainer himself.

As so often, from that seed one can spiral out into similar corpus-investigating tools, such as the online Voyant Toolkit, which makes statistical properties of texts visible and accepts cut-and-pasted text for quick analysis. I am not clear yet how to use some of tools, such as Cirrus-display or the term-berry, but my example was rather short and had little in terms of repeating words.

Because Corpus Linguistics has been going on for a while now, there are a couple of good articles or even books on how to construct corpora on Amazon, mostly targeting linguists however, with a few exceptions.

There has also been criticism in the community, distinguishing corpus linguistics from discourse analysis. The recent exercise that I went through for the purposes of this blog, on Ernest Gellner's book Plow, Sword and Book, effectively plays off the discourse analytic stance against the corpus linguistic one, as I now suspect. The most recent book I was able to obtain that splits the difference comes from the analysis of academic writing.

There have been more principled attacks against corpus linguistics, for example from Noam Chomsky, for example discussed here, which see in corpus linguistics the mistaken assumption that data will eventually induce itself into a theory. (That sounds familiar ....)

There are also people who simply try to explain how corpus linguistics came about and developed, e.g. Karen Fort at INIST.fr. Fort reminds her readers of the incident reported in Hill 1962, when Chomsky overplayed his hand and denying that perform could be used with mass-nouns in English, citing himself as a native speaker as an authority. The British national Corpus revealed however that perform magic is indeed just such a construction. (I would argue that Chomsky fell into a recognition/recall trap here, overestimating the latter based on his excellence at the former. Still---bad for him.)

A more detailed review with 20th century references from the University of Lancaster can be found here. It cites British linguists like H. Widdowson, who in 2000 wrote an article entitled The Limitations of Linguistics Applied in Applied Linguistics, 21/1:3-25.

For, obviously enough, the computer can only cope with the material products of what people do when they use language. It can only analyse the textual traces of the processes whereby meaning is achieved: it cannot account for the complex interplay of linguistic and contextual factors whereby discourse is enacted. ... In reference to Hymes' components of communicative competence (Hymes 1972), we can say that corpus analysis deals with the textually attested, but not with the encoded possible, or the contextually appropriate.  (no page number provided in extract)

Though Widdowson is talking about language learning, he makes a point that bears repeating in a larger context:

... the textual product that is subjected to quantitative analysis is itself a static abstraction. The texts which are collected in a corpus have a reflected reality: they are only real because of the presupposed reality of the discourses of which they are a trace.  (no page number provided in extract)

That seems to me to be the entry point for the importance of discourse analysis. In fact, Widdowson later summarizes his point as

... corpus linguistics provides us with the description of text, not discourse. (no page number provided in extract)

The document than provides a rejoined by M Stubbs,  from 2001, entitled Texts, corpora and problems of interpretation: A response to Widdowson, published in Applied Linguistics 22/2. pp.149-172.

Corpus linguistics therefore investigates relations between frequency and typicality, and instance and norm. It aims at a theory of the typical, on the grounds that this has to be the basis of interpreting what is attested but unusual. (no page number provided in extract)

And more fully later on:

Frequency is not necessarily the same as interpretative significance: an occurrence might be significant in a text precisely because it is rare in a corpus. But unexpectedness is recognizable only against the norm. (no page number provided in extract)

Stubbs notes that this insight is especially important to note conventionality:

... [A] major finding of corpus linguistics is that pragmatic meanings, including evaluative connotations, are more frequently conventionally encoded than is often realized (Kay 1995; Moon 1998; Channell 2000). (no page number provided in extract)

Concepts of convention and norm raise problems in the not infrequent cases when interpretations diverge. (no page number provided in extract)

Stubbs cites the case of cronies in corpus-based dictionaries, but emphasizes that the analysis is made possible by the empirical aspect of corpus studies.

In a 2016 paper in Dialogic Pedagogy by Richards and Pilcher (which works with a somewhat static distinction of objective and subjective language systems) quote Ädel (2010), p.48, who worries about "the inevitable focus on surface forms in corpus work" as well as "the risk of focusing exclusively on the word and the phrase level when using computer-assisted methods" p.49.

It it was, in contrast [to the previously stated, RCK] accepted that the usage and the meaning of the language was creative [IS2], individual [IS1], and only represented the inert hardened crust of the language [IS4] then the linguist would be unable to analyse it isolated from the context in which it was used. (A128)

Except, what choice do the historians have? Voloshinov (or Mikhail Bakhtin, however the debate around Morris 1984 comes out, cf. A123) criticized the departure of linguistics from the antiquarian concerns, where

the ancient written monument [is considered] ... the ultimate realium" (Voloshinov, 1973, p.73, cited in Richards & Pilcher, A123).

Pilcher and Richards cite Bakhtin in observing:

Fundamental to the meaning of language in such a view ... are dialogue and context. The importance of dialogue (Bakhtin 1981, 1986) means that language consists of a stream of unfinished utterances that is continually evolving and is never completed. (A129)

Context is with Bakhtin referred to as a linked chain of previous utterances (A129). Pilcher and Richards mostly focus on spoken language here (e.g. the contribution of intonation to interpreting the word `well`), but some of their concerns are true in larger situations also. Citing Fecho, they write

... to expect that just because you and I are using the same term or phrase that we have a consensus understanding of its meanings is to deny that context and experience have anything to do with our understandings (Fecho, 2011, p.19; cited A130)

Corpus linguistics then generates frequency lists of

... decontextualized signifiers, which in turn are only evidence of past thoughts. (A130)

There was finally also a paper by Nelya Koteyko trying to distinguish the different forms of discourse used in science and their applicability to corpus linguistics, but I did not quite catch the main drift.

Contextual Interpretation

I am trying to put together lists of examples that show why munging together large amounts of textual data can often run afoul of tricks and traps that do not assist in historical analysis, or perhaps other digital humanities as well.

• Shifts in the Meaning of Words 
• "mother-in-law" in Pride and Prejudice actually means the stepmother (Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction, p.53)
• "making love" means for a man to be talking with an unmarried woman in Victorian England (e.g. Ginger Susan Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England, 1995, p69) with the intent of espousing her

• Humorous/Insulting/Derogatory uses of Words
• "nunnery" in Hamlet means a brothel in Elizabethan slang
• "bitch" in rap music

These specific cases are instances of the discourse being not identified properly, e.g. in its mode or in its temporal delineation. But there are more detailed comments we can make about the discursive nature and the context of statements give a suitable example.

The problem of the range of the Discourse

During a discussion of couples' interactions in the New Yorker, the author reminded the reader that the range of a discourse in presidential politics and the presidential White House extends to the previous occupants and their actions as well.

On Tuesday, after Melania [Trump] appeared again to reject the President [Donald Trump], this time on the tarmac in Rome with a slick “down low, too slow” move, Pete Souza, President Obama’s official photographer, posted a photo to his Instagram account of Barack and Michelle tenderly holding hands in Selma, Alabama, a gesture that needed no interpretation.

This is an example of the kind of interaction that is difficult to track or detect without establishing the precise discourse that the item belongs to. Here models of layers of discourse that need to be attended to are crucial.

Eventually, the Washington Post made it clear at a description level, by linking to these (and other) clips and photos, providing the interpretation for those that had missed the discourse contributions. So the hope of large scale ingesting of documents for interpretation is that discourse contributions that are clever in the way that Souza's was will eventually have the kind schoolmaster who spells out what the others suspected. (In some sense, the historians often end up in that role.)

Of course, not every hand-holding couple posted that day is a commentary on the Trumps' situation, but most likely, the George W. Bushes' holding hands would have been, within a specific window of time, of course.

Appendix

Objective as time-independent

In her article on the then-latest breast cancer screening research, 538-science writer Christie Aschwanden noted

Welch’s group has published other studies with similar results. One of those categorized cancers according to stage, rather than size, however, and some critics countered that the way that cancers are categorized has evolved, which could make comparisons difficult. So in this latest study, the researchers looked at size — a measure that is objective and hasn’t changed over time — and came to the same conclusion: Mammography produces an increase in the number of women diagnosed and treated for breast cancer and a non-invasive cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), but it doesn’t do much to prevent the deadliest cases.

The main point I wish to draw attention to is the distinction between evolving categories, such as cancer stages, and the measurement of size. Though her precise wording, namely that size is an objective measure, is contestable, Aschwanden's phrasing suggests that the crucial difference is the one between evolving and categories that remain constant for a duration of research.

Now granted, this is not what people mean when they use the word "objective", but perhaps it is a better meaning for the word than the current one, which seems to imply some socially indisputable common ground.

The power role of historiography

As Justin E.H. Smith put it in his ruminations on what it means to compare Hitler and Trump:

History may be rooted in storytelling, but we can summon it to be something more — the arbiter of truth against lies told in pursuit of power.

Bronze Age Britain and the "Brexit"

In an article from the New Yorker, describing the latest discoveries at Must Farm quarry near Peterborough in England, Charlotte Higgins reflects on the openness of the evidence toward the larger cultural narratives.

At a moment when Britain is anxiously debating its relationship to the Continent, the kind of story one chooses to tell about the nation’s past matters a great deal. According to recent polling, the area around Peterborough is the second most skeptical of E.U. membership in Britain. One archeologist at Must Farm told me that he and his colleagues sometimes joke about the contradictory narratives that could plausibly describe the former life there. “You could probably write either a Euroskeptic or a Europhile account of this site,” he said. One researcher might see an indigenous community that was closely tied to the landscape of East Anglia; another might see an outward-looking people linked to the Continent by its waterways. Archeology is always an encounter between a fixed past and a shifting present; we bring to it our fantasies, prejudices, and predilections—this year different from last year, next year different again.

anecdotally approximating the needs of digital humanity work

(The following is akin to the prologue of a future paper in the digital humanities, a motivator for my research and work.)

Biographically speaking, I am the embodiment of a digital humanities researchers, as I aspire to spend about half of my time in the digital world as a software engineer, and half of my time in the humanities, mostly working on problems of socio-economic history and its impact on religious thought. Moving in both of these worlds makes the disconnect between their tools and capabilities noticeable in a way that I find instructive for the efforts of tooling the digital humanities.

Assume I open my email inbox in the morning and find an email from my fellow software engineer Pace, who has difficulties with a piece of software that I am responsible for. For historical reasons, software engineers have termed these problems "bugs", and the process of bringing this issue to my attention is termed a "bug report". In her bug report, Pace will describe what she did, what the expected outcome was, and what happened instead. Software engineers have a standard method for dealing with these issue: we boil the "bug" down to a small program that verifies that the expected inputs produce the expected outcomes---we call that a "unit test"---and then tweak and modify the existing software until the unit test passes, that is, the program no longer exhibits the erroneous behavior. In doing so, good software projects draw upon their existing unit tests---long-running projects will have tens of thousands of these. Passing all unit tests ensures that eliminating one bug did not introduce any other issues: Primum, non nocere.

Assume that in the afternoon, when I check my other inbox, I find an email from fellow digital humanities researcher Paige. Paige just found a problem with one of the transcribed sources that I shared with her from the archival work that I did for my dissertation. The problem may be very small. Perhaps we can even sort out what the difficulty was and rectify it---the source may now be digitized and accessible on the web. But I have no quick and safe way to incorporate that correction into my dissertation, though it exists as a set of LaTeX files that are themselves easy to change. I have no representation of the argument that my dissertation is making. I have no way of verifying that incorporating Paige's correction is local and will not affect other claims that I make.

Of course, that situation is not very different from the one that I found myself in while writing the dissertation to begin with. It seems statistically implausible that there are no flawed steps in an argument spanning a dozen chapters, a couple hundred of pages and consisting of tens of thousands of words. No manager would hire a developer who wrote a program of that size and had checked its correctness only in their head.

Don't get me wrong: I love lemmatized POS-tagged corpora of major writers as much as the next guy does. But the main product of the humanities is arguments, and crucially counter-arguments, narratives that go against what the public already believes to be the case. Should we not devote the same care to them as software developers toward their code?

the possibility of digitally supporting argumentation in the humanities

As noted in my previous post,  while the decision process regarding the quality of arguments in the digital humanities is complicated and usually involves mainly sins of omission, the basic model of an argument being open to confirmation makes for a sensible launching point to bring DH support to bear.

It is important to understand that at the level of generality under discussion here, there is no principal bias toward formal models of argumentation. By this I mean that there is no bias toward argumentation whose rules of inference have already been formalized (such as first-order predicate calculus or decision logic or similar). However, it seems to me that the interest in the ability of others to follow our arguments implies that the rules of inference I use in my argument could at least in principle be formalized. If such a "mechanical" or "symbolic" notion of inference is admitted, then Turing has good news for us: such a process of validation of an argument is a Turing-computable function and we can bring effective digital support to bear on the problem.

On the one hand it seems clear that, within the schools of the various disciplines of the humanities, rules for what are valid and proper forms of argumentation (and what are not) have developed and are taught successfully to the new generation. (This is the direction that Thomas Kuhn's arguments about the paradigms of scientific practice are hinting toward.) On the other hand, most humanities scholars would be hard-pressed to successfully formalize their underlying rules of inference. They may even have difficulties to press the forms of argumentation of their school of thinking correctly into another formalized system of inference---such as first-order predicate logic or decision logic.

The situation appears perhaps even more difficult when faced with heuristics, by which I mean argument constructs that are rule-like but are mutually exclusive and are known to be only valid in some situations. Perhaps best-known in the humanities are the rules for cross-document textual interpretation when reconstructing an Urtext, such as lectio difficilior or lectio brevior.  These heuristics come into conflict if the shorter text eliminated difficulties.

But even if we are admonished not to apply these heuristics mechanically, the fact that their weighing against each other could be taught suggests that they can be explained and in the limit applied mechanically by those wishing to understand the process of our weighing, that is our argument.

Carson and the Pseudo-Archeologists

Presidential candidate Ben Carson made use of his Seventh-Day Adventist convictions to interpret the Pyramids as grain silos, provoking reactions from many archeologists, such as Kristina Killgrove, who pointed out not only various issues with the claim but also to general recent efforts in combating pseudo-archeology in the first place. The most interesting of these are the initiative to review pseudo-archeological work in archeological reviews and the link to a Fall 2015 university course on that problem.

My take-home quote for right now is

In the second review, The Ancient Alien Question, archaeologist Jeb Card points out, as does Feder, that the origins of this idea lay in Victorian mysticism and Theosophy, a movement that “blended hermetic magic, spiritualism, Western curiosity ab[o]ut Eastern religion, colonial racism, and misconceptions of evolution into a worldview of root races, lost continents, and ascended masters who originated on Venus or other worlds.

Models of FW's Conceptualization of Trinity and Christology

There is a set of pairwise terms that Falk Wagner and his modern interpreters have used to discuss the inner-trinitarian and the christological situation with respect to an interpretation of modern religion guided by religious sociology.

FW himself had used

• Transzendenz und Immanenz
• Selbstsein und Anderssein
• Personalität und Sozietät

to capture the structure of Christology. FW can even speak of "personaler Transzendenz und sozialer Immanenz". The point is always to retain the "Selbstzweck" of the individual in the face of the powerful social systems. In this context, FW dispenses with super-natural subjects and functionalizes them for the construction and build-out of the religious consciousness.

His interpreters accept the transcendent and immanent conceptualization, but propose to use instead pairs such as

• Offenbarung und Geschichte
• Glaube und Geschichte
• Selbstverständnis und Selbstbild
• Dogmatik und Historie

to capture the Christological structure. The argument goes that revelation and history replace the dual-nature problem in Christ for the Enlightenment theology, and under the impact of David Friedrich Strauss transform the revelation-aspect into the faith-aspect (Ritschl und Herrmann). 

This follows FW's lead in emphasizing the fact that only the individual's religiosity can be the proper subject of study in modern times. This allows to treat Christology as the theory of the symbolic representation in the self-relationship of the religious consciousness. Though nobody has written so, AFAIK, this meshes well with the Reformation notion of a "simul iustus et peccator", where the self-understanding is iustus while the self-image as historical is peccator. 

The drawback of that strategy is that it truncates the social aspect of the solution FW had sketched. Theology has no longer any contribution to make to the question of the Selbstzweck of the individual, or has to do so using a completely different road.

For the point of departure with FW is that the realization of the self in ignorance of the other is the definition of sin. FW's criticism vis-a-vis Barth is that it cannot be sin if mankind does it but the height of divine majesty if God does it, and that is why the correspondence of self and other in its reflexive logic of acceptance (Anerkennungslogik) has to be placed at the core of the trinitarian description. 

From this point of view, the self-understanding of the religious consciousness is a reduction that leaves quite a bit of the productivity of the FW approach by the wayside.

PS: In this context, FW's critics claim the "Zugangsproblem" that dogmatics and empirical sociology of religion can both only provide the services of "deuten und konstruieren" for the empirical religion as lived. However, the difference that FW seems to be after is the distinction between normative and descriptive, as in linguistics; and to the extent that dogmatic theology is willing to be descriptive only, it has effectively traded places with a sociology of religion that proceeds in an empirical fashion. At least a juxtaposition of the shape "Dogmatik und Historie" does not lend credence to that tack, however.

Mildenberger über Heilsgeschichte

Mildenberger emphasizes that the term itself is of 19th century origin (Erlanger Theologican J. Ch. K. v. Hofmann), even if pietistic Biblizism in the style of J.A. Bengel and F.Ch. Oetinger as well as the Federationtheology of the 16th century prefigure the notion (sp.1584).

Mildenberger notes that the premise to such thinking is accepting all of history as one reality, which only begins to take place in the 2nd half of the 18th century (sp.1584). Here, Heilsgeschichte effectively replaces metaphysics for dogmatics (sp.1584) and has to find a profile in comparison to world history.

Already in Hofmann's work the curious move, that Salvation History has existence independent of any knowing subject surfaces here (p.1585). Key criticisms of this position are Bultmann [presumably Geschichte und Eschatologie?, 1955?] and O. Cullmann's Heil als Geschichte, 1965.

Salvation history finds use in conservative positions that insist on the verbal inspiration of the Biblical writings, coupled with a modern notion of history, which is then intended to counter the historical critical reconstructions of the Biblical narratives.

Hier ist die mehr oder weniger streng gefaßte Vorstellung der Verbalinspiration mit einem modernen Verständnis geschichtlicher Tatsächlichkeit verknüpft. (sp.1585)

 However, Mildenberger indicates the problems that this approach has.

Heilsgeschichte als Systematisierung des biblischen Erzählens von Gottes Handeln erweist sich ## darin als problematisch, daß sie die biblischen Erzählungen in einen diesen fremden Zusammenhang einer einzigen Geschichte bringen will. Dabei kommt ein dem biblischen Reden fremder Begriff von Tatsächlichkeit und zeitlicher Kontinuität ins Spiel, der die biblischen Erzählungen auf einen hinter diesen liegenden Tatsachenzusammenhang hin befragt. ... dieser konstruierte Tatsachenzusammenhang (soll dann, RCK) als Heilsgeschichte die objektive Grundlage des Glaubens sein.  Die moderne Geschichtskonstruktion tritt an die Stelle des biblischen Redens, wo auch die einzelnen Inhalte der biblischen Erzählung entnommen sind. (sp.1586)

No approach of Salvation History can escape the assumption that history can be interpreted at all as such a unified process (sp.1586).

Die Bestimmung der Gesamtwirklichkeit als Heilsgeschichte setzt voraus, daß Geschichte überhaupt als sinnvoller zielgerichteter Gesamtzusammenhang erfasßt werden kann. Das ist aber ein keineswegs selbstverständliches Wirklichkeitsverständnis. (sp.1586)

Mildenberger proposes to drop the use of the term altogether (sp.1586).

Bibliographie

Friedrich Mildenberger, Art. Heilsgeschichte, RGG4, Band 3, sp.1584-1586.

• O. Cullmann, Heil als Geschichte, 1965.
• R. Bultmann, Geschichte und Eschatologie, 1955?
• Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, 1949 (= Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen, 1953).
• R. Koselleck, Art Geschichte, V-VII, GGB2, 647-717.

Islamic State and Modernity

In preparation for considering the problem of secularization, I am reading a set of essays edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Heinrich Meier, Politik und Religion: Zur Diagnose der Gegenwart, published in 2013 by C.H.Beck.

The essay by Hillel Fradkin, Die lange Suche nach dem islamischen Staat,  (the long search for the Islamic state), and argues that the Islamic world, after the conquering successes of Mohammed, reigned such a large stretch of land for such a long time (1400 years from Hegira to the Fall of the Ottoman Empire) that Modernity for them is like a nightmare, nibbling away their success first in colonialism and then in modern republican nationalism (pp.136-139). That the infidels should rule the faithful appears like a devilish perversion, because it negates the trope of the superior political organization.

After discussing the Brotherhood in Egypt and the Iranian Revolution, Fradkin turns to the problem of what modernity means as a configuration for Islam.

Denn objektiv gesehen, und nach Erfahrung der westlichen Politik zu urteilen, welche die muslimische Macht zurückdrängte, ist die Macht, deren es heute bedarf, um die Weltpolitik zu dominieren, eine Funktion der Aneignung der Moderne. Damit ist nicht nur die moderne Technologie, sondern zuallererst der moderne Republikanismus und das moderne Denken gemeint, das beides hervorbrachte. Nicht zufällig war dieses Denken von Anfang an in hohem Maße von der Frage der Macht präokkupiert. Zumindest was die Macht betrifft, hat das moderne Denken sein Versprechen gehalten, insbesondere gilt dies für die ökonomische Macht, auf der andere Formen der Macht beruhen. (p.159)

[Viewed objectively, and judged by the experiences of western politics, which have pushed back Muslim power,  is the power that is necessary these days, to dominate world politics, a function of the acquisition of modernity. This does not mean just modern technology, but before all else, modern republicanism and the modern thinking that brought these two about. It is no accident that this thinking was preoccupied from the get-go to a high degree by the question of power. At least as far as power is concerned, the modern thinking kept its promise, and this is especially true for economic power, on which the other forms of power are founded. (p.159)]

But that seems to invert several things, in my mind. While economic power is clearly not independent of resources and raw materials, is it not most heavily tied to technological advances and a workforce that can participate in their use and construction?  Now, one can argue that modern republicanism is a prerequisite for that, but the Chinese system suggests that this is not necessarily so.

Mormon Postmodernism

One of the oddest creatures is the Mormon post-modernist, the staunch defender of the most large scale narrative in Western history attacking the sceptics with the tools of anti-large scale narrative and epistemic investigations.

Alan Goff may be the most famous one: After writing his thesis at BYU on this issue, he continued to publish articles on this issue, up until the present. A favorite target of his is Dan Vogel and his interpretations of the way the Book of Mormon came about.

• 2005 review of Dan Vogel's Making of a Prophet
• 2014 article on The Inevitability of Epistemology in Historiography (which attacks Dan Vogel again, for many pages, and needs trimming)

some French uses of the notion of an intellectual matrix

In its French form, la matrice intellectuelle, the concept is used to reconstruct the world stance of an intellectual movement. (Care has to be taken when reading these French texts, esp feminist authors, as matrice on its own also can mean the uterus. Cf. Emilie Malefant below, where about 70% of the references are anatomical.)

The French historian Yvan Lamond, in his essay L’émergence de l’intellectuel vue des Amériques, (pp.114f), in the reader of Michel Trebitsch, Marie-Christine Granjon (ed), Pour une histoire comparée des intellectuels: textes, 1998, Lamond speaks both of the cultural matrix and the intellectual matrix of the time of the Dreyfus Affaire, which that affair highlighted and revealed (p.114), to the point of bringing about the intellectual as a cultural force (p.115). Lamond provides no other clues about this construct.

The French historian Etienne Fouilloux, in his book Une Eglise en quête de liberté : La pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II (1914-1962) [i.e. A Church in Search of Liberty: French Catholic Thought during Modernism and the 2nd Vatican, 1914-1962], Paris (1998), p.10, can write:

The modernist crisis constitutes the intellectual matrix of contemporary Catholicism precisely insofar as it is defined as a re-reading of the founding message in light of the scientific forms of knowledge of the last century. (p.10)

In her master thesis from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, Emilie Malenfant reconstructs the genealogy of the intellectual matrix of misogyny of the Third Reich, without ever defining what that might be or offering clues to the secondary literature. Malenfant wants to have an "ideological matrix" that is not restricted to the intellectual, but widened to encompass medicine, philosophy, sociology and politics (p.21). Clearly she assumes that the philosophical discourse contributes to the matrix construction (p.25), bringing also the cultural into the game when writing about the "intellectual and cultural matrix" (p.25), though without distinguishing it properly from either of the constituent matrices of the conjunction.

French Wikipedia does not define the term, but use it. For example, in its article on the French Militia, they write:

L'organisation est fondée sur 21 points qui donnent la matrice idéologique du mouvement : « contre le capitalisme international, pour le corporatisme français », « contre la condition prolétarienne, pour la justice sociale », « contre la lèpre juive, pour la pureté française », « contre la franc-maçonnerie païenne, pour la civilisation chrétienne ».

PS: The Argentinian Sephardic theologian Mario Javier Saban wrote a Spanish book that placed the matrix straight into the title: La Matriz Intelectual del Judaismo y La Genesis de Europa, 2005.

some English uses of the notion of an intellectual matrix

In his 1969 postscript to the Structure of Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn introduced the term disciplinary matrix (Kuhn 1970:180) as the locus of the change during the paradigm shift, and defined it as

the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given community (Kuhn 1970:175)

In their book 2012 Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research, the authors Gayle Letherby, John Scott and Malcolm Williams suggested to broaden disciplinary matrix to intellectual matrix, to shed the restriction to a specific discipline or specialization (p.24 Fn 4).

In a 2013 book entitled Biblical Narrative and Palestine's History, Thomas L. Thompson of the Copenhagen School of biblical criticism used the concept of "intellectual matrix" as the basis for Chapter 8, entitled The intellectual matrix of early biblical narrative: inclusive monotheism in Persian period Palestine (pp. 105-118). This chapter repeated an argument that Thompson had published in the essay collection The Triumph of Elohim: From Yahwisms to Judaisms edited by Diana Vikander Edelman from 1995. Here, Thompson uses the terms literary matrix and intellectual matrix (pp.112-113) interchangeably to denote the interpretation of the Exile as a mental event.

Concepts and literary works commonly thought to be exilic and post exilic have referents recognized as adhering to the defining ideology of Exile — whatever the exile’s actual historicity. In such literature, the exile is presented first of all as an event of the mind within the intellectual world of early Judaism and functions as a literary matrix for large portions of the Bible. This is true whatever events, if any, actually occurred that might be regarded as a “return”. What are commonly designated as exilic and post exilic texts, as well as some of the later compose collections of the Old Testament, whether the Septuagint || or the later Massoretic [sic!] collection called the Hebrew Bible, all flow from this intellectual matrix and must, therefore, be chronologically subsequent. (pp.112-113)

Perhaps more typical of the problem is the use that James F. Ward makes in his monograph Language, Form and Inquiry: Arthur F. Bentley's Philosophy of Social Science, 1984, where the 2nd chapter is entitled The Intellectual Matrix of Bentley's Social Science, without ever defining what might be meant with that. Ward writes that:

This chapter [i.e. the 2nd chapter, RCK] is concerned with the milieu in which Bentley’s early thinking was formed and the way in which he began his course of inquiry. The central question is how Bentley arrived at the problem that unifies his work: the search for the foundations of social science. The path to the philosophy of social science led Bentley through a series of intellectual encounters which expanded the horizons of his thinking and which reveal his growing intellectual independence. (p.15)

leaving it unclear whether the intellectual matrix is understood here as the residue of the Entwicklungsroman of Bentley' intellectual encounters, or the unifying problem of Bentley's research, or something else entirely.

We owe Ellen Meiksins Wood's Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought (2011) the reference to and explication of Quentin Skinner's 1978 book The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, which takes a hyper-contextualizing approach to political vocabulary.

His [i.e. Quentin Skinner, RCK] main strategy, here as elsewhere in his work, was to cast his net more widely than historians of political thought have customarily done, considering not just the leading theorists but, as he put it,  “the more general social and intellectual matrix out of which their works arose”. [= Skinner, ibid, p.x] (p.8)

In Skinner's use then, the social matrix and the intellectual matrix are almost akin to levels of discourse of different parts of society, rather than agglomerations of conceptual notions.  Meiksins Wood writes:

It turns out that the ‘social matrix’ has little to do with ‘society’, the economy, or even the polity. The social context is itself intellectual, or at least the ‘social’ is defined by, and only by, existing vocabularies. The ‘political life’ that sets the || agenda for theory is essentially a language game. In the end, to contextualize a text is to situate it among other texts, among a range of vocabularies, discourses and ideological paradigms at various levels of formality, from the classics of political thought down to ephemeral screeds or political speeches. (pp.8-9)

Rob Moore, in his book Basil Bernstein: The Thinker and the Field, 2013, uses "intellectual matrix" to mean a substratum of the disciplinary or social discourse of his time.

The exegesis of [Basil, RCK] Bernstein’s thinking must involve a consideration of when he thought what he did, both in terms of the intellectual matrix of the time, the nexus of personal relationships and broader social conditions and issues. It must be concerned with the time and the place of the ideas. (p.3)

Rob Moore then equates the term ‘meta-dialogue’, coined by Hasan (1999) [= Ruqaiya Hasan, Speaking with Reference to a Context,  In M. Ghadessy (Ed.), Text and Context in Functional Linguistics: Systemic Perspectives (pp. 219-328). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. RCK], as equivalent to “an intellectual matrix of ideas”, which is used to describe a 

... nexus of personal and institutional relationships — University College London (UCL), where Halliday and Douglas were based, is ‘around the corner’ from the University of London Institute of Education where Bernstein and Hasan worked. (p.15)

Jairo Moreno, in his discussion of the Argentinian Jazz musician Guillermo Klein, as part of his essay Past Identity: Guillermo Klein, Miguel Zenón, and the Future of Jazz, in: Pablo Vila (ed), Music and Youth Culture in Latin America, 2014, pp.81-105, contrasts the type of matrices which constrain Klein’s work with those that constrain, according to Lewis (2008) [= George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, Chicago (University of Chicago Press), 2008. RCK], the work of African American musicians (p.88).

Moreno (p.88) quotes Lewis (2008:447) as saying that African American musicians are under an imperative to

situate their work in a complexly articulated African American intellectual, social, and sonic matrix” (Lewis 2008:447); cited (p.88)

In contrast, Moreno argues, Klein is under no such imperative; though his work is

articulated to a local-national social and intellectual matrix, and in turn to an international critical matrix that in a way preceded it and helped to shape it. What is more, these matrices rarely intersect. When they do, they disrupt as much as they enable one another. (p.88) 

Moreno interprets the notion of matrix as belonging to competing modernities.

… matrices operate independently from each other as embodiments of actually existing multiple modernities—modernities that are no longer local variants of a centrally dominant US or European modernity. (p.89) 

In 2014, S. Demazeux used the Kuhnian notion of the disciplinary matrix in an article in the International Journal of Epidemiology to analyze the consolidation of psychiatric epidemiology. Because Demazeux diagnosed a "weak coherence of its intellectual components" (Abstract), the almost-discipline is noted to have a "weak intellectual matrix" (ibid).

In his 2014 online faculty profile at Princeton, Thomas Conlan, Professor of East Asian Studies and History, uses the term the terms “social, political and intellectual matrix of fourteenth-century Japan” as the object of transformation targeted by the violence that he describes in his monograph State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth Century Japan (2003).

The online Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History in its article on Intellectual Life uses the matrix terminology at least twice. For the colonial period, it denotes the shape into which the oppression of slavery confined intellectual African thinking for the slaves brought to the colonies.

... an African-American tradition of sacred and secular folk thought in sermons, tales, aphorisms, proverbs, narrative poems, sacred and secular songs, verbal games, and other linguistic forms became the primary matrix for historicizing, interpreting, and speculating about the nature and meaning of society and the cosmos.

The alternative matrix of the Enlightenment was available to the African Americans through the free schools and societies, as the article eloquently notes.

But Free African societies and fraternal orders like the Prince Hall Masons also provided a counterconventional intellectual matrix—for mastering the secular and sacred freethought traditions of the Radical Enlightenment, in which the proselytizing mythographers of freemasonry and Renaissance hermeticism offered African-American free thinkers secret access to a "perennial philosophy" that hypothesized an unbroken continuity with, and a reverential attitude toward, the esoteric symbol systems and pagan wisdom literatures of ancient North Africa and the Orient.

On the writing part of writing

Spent some time today reading Sean Hood about general tips on writing and especially on screen writing. I especially liked the iterative process of improvement sketched here, which is almost directly applicable to research as well:

Collection => Collation => Execution => Presentation => Collection

As Sean points out, the more direct way to cast this creative endeavor is to use the notions of

Survey => Learn => Improve => Share => Survey

which fit very broadly across artistic, academic and inquisitional activities.