Monday, October 06, 2008

The One True Language

In Seven Nights, Borges has an essay where he describes the process by which he first read the Divine Comedy:

They were very handy books, published by Dent. They fit into my pocket. On the left was the Italian text, and on the right a literal translation. I devised this modus operandi: I first read a verse, a tercet, in the English prose; then I read the verse in Italian; and so on through to the end of the canto. Then I read the whole canto in English, and finally in Italian. With that first reading I realized that the translations were no substitute for the original text. The translation could be, at best, a means and a stimulus for the reader to approach the original. ... Poetry is, among so many other things, an intonation, an accentuation that is often untranslatable.

I was recently reminded of this because I decided that my digital history grad class should use the Processing programming language for their group project. Since I haven't programmed in the language before, I bought a couple of textbooks and sat down to read them, slowing when I needed to mentally translate unfamiliar commands into more familiar idioms.

Beginning programmers often worry about which language to learn first. Which one is the most powerful? The most useful? The easiest to learn? Which one will help me to get a high paying job? The investment of a semester or a year seems like a long time to study something when it might turn out to be the wrong choice. At a theoretical level, programming languages are deeply equivalent, but that is more a matter of theory than practice... because every programming language makes some things easy and some things hard. Or in the slogan of one language, "makes easy things easy and hard things possible." These language differences become the stuff of holy wars, but they shouldn't. The best language for the job depends largely on the job.

Processing, for instance, has built-in commands that make it easy to map numbers from one range of values to another. Now this isn't something that is too difficult to program from more primitive commands; it comes up frequently enough that you learn how to do it in whatever language you're using. But when I read the description of the Processing commands, I realized that I have implemented similar functions in almost every language that I've ever programmed in. By choosing to make this a language primitive, the designers of Processing made it easier for beginners to do a number of different tasks, including scaling the ranges of values returned by different analog sensors (which is something my students will need to do).

There's no one true language for programming any more than there is one true language for humanism, or one true wood for carpenters. As Borges says, the intonations of poetry are often untranslatable, and it's true for code, too. In a sense, you don't really know how to program until you're familiar with more than one language, because the essence of programming consists in knowing how to translate the idioms of one language into a more or less familiar one. And this is something that humanists have long known: if there is a oneness and truth to language, it is to be found in the multiple practices of translation.

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Friday, October 03, 2008

Navigating Digital History

This year, one of the first slides that I put up for the new Science, Technology and Global History class that Rob MacDougall and I are teaching was a quote from Patrick Manning's Navigating World History:

Navigating world history is an ambitious but limited goal, one quite distinct from the unattainable aim of "mastering" the topic. No one can learn all of world history. Anyone who pursues such a goal is sure to become lost. To strike an analogy, all those who have attempted to conquer the world have failed, but many of those who have traveled the globe have gained pleasure and expanded their understanding. (x)

I originally intended this forewarning as a way of managing expectations. I figured the students wouldn't be so disappointed in me when they found out that one consequence of taking on the history of everything from the Big Bang to human extinction is that the sum of the prof's knowledge asymptotically approaches zero. The students, however, seem to be taking my relative ignorance in stride, and the quote has mostly served to console me when I have to leave some stuff out of my lectures.

I was reminded of navigation the other day when I met with a PhD student who is close to finishing her doctorate and thinking about her second project. She wants to do something with digital sources but is having a hard time getting her bearings. Our conversation made me realize that I didn't have a single-page "getting started" guide for people who have never seriously worked with online sources. So here it is.

1. You won't be able to read everything. In fact, new material on your topic will appear online faster than you can read it. The longer you work on a topic, the more behind you will get. It's OK, because everyone faces this problem whether they realize it or not.

2. The first tool you should master is the search engine. Most people think that typing a word or two into the Google or Yahoo! search box is all that you need to know. Not so! First of all, search engines have an advanced search page that lets you focus in on your topic, exclude search terms, weight some terms more than others, limit your results to particular kinds of document, to particular sites, to date ranges, and so on. Second, different search engines introduce different kinds of bias by ranking results differently. You get a better view when you routinely use more than one.

3. You should have a strategy for information trapping. An explicit search is something that you do once, but the web is constantly changing. By using RSS feeds it is possible to set up a number of searches that run automatically and provide you with a constantly updated view of your subject. You can learn more about the technique in Tara Calishain's Information Trapping.

4. You can organize citations right in your browser. Until you start doing advanced work in digital history, you will access almost all of your online sources through your web browser. If you use Zotero, you can keep track of those sources in your browser, too. It really speeds up the research process.

5. It is possible to automate the process of downloading sources. There are a number of tools that make it easy to grab large batches of online sources without having to download them one at a time. In the Firefox browser, for example, you can use something like DownThemAll. Another option is GNU Wget.

6. The web is not structured like a ball of spaghetti. A lot of the most interesting information to be gleaned from digital sources lies in the hyperlinks leading into and out of various nodes, whether personal pages, documents, archives, institutions, or what have you. Search engines provide some rudimentary tools for mapping these connections, but much more can be learned with more specialized tools.

7. Assume that what you want to know is out there, and go looking for it.

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