Making and Using Tools
Part of the misunderstanding between artists and scientists is that science does not involve the intuition of the artist. However, science is not a mechanical application of scientific method. It must start with a hypothesis, which can be formed only through intuition. It's like a recipe for hippopotamus pie which starts: Find a hippopotamus. You can learn its habits and hang around its habitats to increase the chance of finding it but it is not the mechanical following of a recipe. This is the art at the heart of science. A concrete example may help. I once made an electronic version of a book called "The Originals", which described the originals for about 3,000 fictional characters. My version could be searched not only by character and by original, as in the book, but also by novel and by writer. I was not doing science - I was creating a tool for a scientist. Any scientist/artist with some creative hypothesis about the process by which the experience of an author is transmuted into fiction could use my tool to reduce the "footwork" in assembling the evidence.
In the early stage of a discipline, more work is devoted to tool-making than to tool-using. Much of this book is devoted to this necessary, but not sufficient, first step. Some of the contributors venture into the second more exciting tool-using phase when those computer-internet tools for scholars in the humanities, which reduce the time spent on the mundane matter of finding stuff, enable scientists and artists with an intuitive hypothesis to provide us insight into the creative process in our species. I look forward to the sequel to this book, when the focus shifts to this tool-using phase. |
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