Milestone among Gravestones
This book consists of a Preface, a Foreword, three Introductions, seventeen Papers (one by six authors), and an Afterword. I could exhaust my allotted words just listing the 35 contributors and their credentials. The index lists over 100 acronyms of various institutions mentioned in the book (the alphabet soup is stirred in bilingual Canada). I could exhaust my allotted words by providing an Antidote to Acronym Shock in which those acronyms are spelled out. Let us just say that you can be assured that every individual and institution associated with "Humanities Computing and the Canadian Academic Community" is mentioned - there is, as usual, a catchy title that sells the book followed by a subtitle which tells what the book is about. The book emerged from a milestone meeting on Mind Technologies at the University of Toronto in May 2002, attended by the presidents of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and Humanities and Social Science Federation of Canada. It's a pleasure to see a milestone amid the gravestones, since every recent book and conference about the humanities seems to be about the crisis.
Transcending Art and Science
This is the state of the art. Or perhaps rather the state of the science. My own department changed its name from Communication Arts to Communication Studies in order to embrace science. When recently there was talk of the Faculty of Arts and Science splitting, the consensus was that we would go with the Arts. That would be sad. The unique feature of our discipline and other humanities is that they bridge the gap between art and science. Those of us who study the work of artists are not thereby artists and those of us who study the work of scientists are not thereby scientists. We all belong to a meta-discipline which transcends this art-science dichotomy and thereby avoids the mutual misunderstandings between those "two cultures" bemoaned by C. P. Snow. This book, by consolidating the case for the use of the method of science to study the content of art, provides an excellent contribution to this meta-discipline.
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