- Image via Wikipedia
Dan Cohen has decided to “crowdsource” (a fascinating blend, by the way) the title of his next book with the following instructions.
The title should be a couplet like “The X and the Y” where X can be “Highbrow Humanities” “Elite Academia” “The Ivory Tower” “Deep/High Thought” [insert your idea] and Y can be “Lowbrow Web” “Common Web” “Vernacular Technology/Web” “Public Web” [insert your idea]. so possible titles are “The Highbrow Humanities and the Lowbrow Web” or “The Ivory Tower and the Wild Web” etc.
via Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog » Blog Archive » Crowdsourcing the Title of My Next Book.
Before I offer my suggestion, let me pause and wonder how do we know what the book is to be about? Well, we know exactly what it is to be about because what he has in fact done was describe its contents in the form of two cross domain mappings that are then mapped onto each other (a sort of a double-barrel metaphor). And the title, it goes without saying (in a culture that agrees on what titles should be) should as eloquently and entertainingly point to the complex mapping through yet more mappings (if this was a post on blending theory, I’d elaborate on this some more).
We (I mean us the digitized or unanalog) can also roughly guess what Dan Cohen’s stance will be and if he were to be writing it just for us, we’d much rather just get it as a series of blog posts, or perhaps not at all. The paragraph quoted above is enough for us. We know what’s going on.
So aware of the ease with which meaning was co-constructed, I would recommend a more circumspect and ambiguous title. The Tortoise and the Hare with a subtitle: Who’s Chasing Whom in Digital Scholarship or possibly The Winners and Losers of Digital Academia. Why this title? Well, I believe in challenging preconceptions, starting with our own. The tale of the Tortoise and the Hare (as the excellent Wikipedia entry documents) offers no easy answer. Or rather it offers too many easy answers for comfort. The first comes from the title and a vague awareness of the fact that this is a story about a speed contest between two animals who are stereotypes for the polar opposites of speed. So the first impression is “of course, the hare is the winner” and this is a book about the benefits of digital scholarship, so the digital scholars must be the hare. Also, and also digital equals fast so that means the book is about how the hare of digital scholarship is leaving the tortoise of ivory-tower academia in the dust. And we could come up with a dozen stories illustrating how this is the case.
Then we pause and remember, ah, but didn’t the tortoise win the race because of the hasty overconfidence and carelessness of the hare? So that means that perhaps the traditional academics, moving slowly but deliberately, are the favored ones, after all? Can’t we all also think of too many errors made on blogs, crowdsourced encyclopedic entries and easily make the case that the deliberate approach is superior to moving at breakneck speed? Aren’t hares known for their short and precarious life spans as well as speed while the tortoise is almost proverbial in its longevity?
But the moral of the story is even more complex and less determinate. If we continue further in our deliberations, we might be able to get a few more hints of this. In particular, we must ask, what does this story tell us about speed and wisdom? And the answer must be: absolutely nothing. We knew coming into it that hares were faster than tortoises over any distance that can be traveled by both animals. We’re not exactly clear why the tortoise challenged the hare. Unless it had secret knowledge of its narcolepsy, it couldn’t have possibly known that the hare would take a nap or get distracted (depending on the version of the story) in the middle of the race? So equating the tortoise with wisdom would seem foolish. At best we can see the tortoise as an inveterate gambler whose one-in-a-million bet paid off. We would certainly be foolish (as was noticed by Lord Dunsany cited in the Wikipedia entry) to assume that the hare’s loss makes the tortoise more suitable for a job delivering a swift message over the same journey the following day. So the only possible learning could be that taking nap in the middle of a race and not waking up in time can lead to loosing the race. Conceivably, there could be something about the dangers of overconfidence. But again didn’t we know this already through many much less ambiguous stories?
What does that mean for the digital and traditional scholarship? Very tentatively, I would suggest it is that we cannot predict the results of a single race (i.e. any single academic enterprise) based purely on the known (or inferred) qualities of one approach. There are too many variables. But neither can we discount what we know about the capabilities of one approach in favor of another simply because it proved to be a failure where we would have expected success. In a way, just like with the fable, we already know everything about the situation. For some things hares are better than tortoises and vice versa. Most of the time, our expectations are borne out and sometimes they are not. Sometimes the differences are insignificant, sometimes they matter a lot. In short, life is pretty damn complicated, and hoping a simple contrast of two prejudice-laden images will help us understand it better is perhaps the silliest thing of all. But often it is also the thing without which understanding would be impossible. So perhaps the moral of this story, this blog, and of Dan Cohen’s book really should be: beware of easy understandings.
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