By Peter C. Herman · Friday, May 17, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative  In 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture on “The Two Cultures.” Snow’s fundamental point was that humanists and scientists speak past each other, assuming that they communicate at all. “[I]ntellectual life,” Snow writes, “is increasingly being split into two polar groups.” At one end, “literary intellectuals,” at the other, “scientists,” and between the two “a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.” Scientists don’t read any imaginative literature because it has no practical application; and humanists ignore science because they think it is “of no interest either in its own value or its consequences.” The result is a split that does nobody any good.
While Snow’s thesis has not entirely aged well (many universities today, for example, mandate that students take courses in both the sciences and the humanities) and while one can find isolated examples of people combining both (e.g., Oliver Sacks), the response by faculty to the recent wave of protests shows that a deep gulf still separates the humanities and the sciences.
Continue reading →
By Peter C. Herman · Friday, May 11, 2018 In the April 12, 2018, issue of Art Journal, the editor, Rebecca Brown, introduces a work of art (really, a computer program), called CitationBomb by Zach Kailer, intended to create a kind of “denial of service” attack on Google Scholar: “The more users do this, the more Google Scholar will become overflowed with citations. This will make it difficult for the algorithms to make sense of influence or impact.” The overall point is to “devalue scholarly metrics” as they represent in small the horrors of the neoliberal university. As Brown puts it, “what numerical value applies to achieving the arc of a compelling paragraph? [It makes] manifest the un-usefulness of analytics . . . its profound, destructive force.”
Why are “analytics” so destructive? Kaiser explains that Google Scholar incentives “clickbait scholarship.” Meaning, since Google Scholar puts first the books or articles that get the most citations, this leads to a “winner take all” situation with scholarship. Only the articles that are cited often get cited at all, leaving all the other scholars in the dust.
Continue reading →
|
|
