The Practice of Collaborative Questioning in Humanities Computing McMaster University Multimedia Togo Salmon Hall 309A McMaster University 1280 Main St. W., Hamilton, ON L8S 4M2 georock[at]mcmaster[dot]ca http://www.geoffreyrockwell.com Abstract: An important challenge computing brings to the humanities is how we can formalize research questions to the point where computing methods might be useful. The ways we bring questions to evidence in the humanities do not always lend themselves to the formalization needed to develop computer assisted methods in support of research. First, questioning in the humanities often happens in a dialogical fashion where there is a collaboration between small teams (with researchers, students and programmers), developers of scholarly evidence (as in scholarly electronic texts), and other researchers who have published interpretations of the evidence. Second, the questioning is iterative rather than taking the form of a "grand problem". In this talk I will present a model of how computing tools can be used in humanities research and discuss initiatives to develop the TAPoR framework for text analysis tools. The TAPoR framework is itself the result of a collaboration and it in turn supports forms of collaboration. Humanists are not supposed to be good at collaborative research, but we are good at dialogue which is our form of collaboration. Bio: Geoffrey Rockwell is an Associate Professor in Humanities Computing and Multimedia at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Haverford College and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. His thesis was on the subject of philosophical dialogue. He has also worked for many years as an instructional technology specialist at the University of Toronto. He is currently the project leader for TAPoR, a Text Analysis Portal for Research, which is developing a text tool portal for researchers who work with electronic texts. |