During the last few weeks, I have had occasion to think seriously about my discipline, my scholarship and my future. Not entirely the result of writing that blasted Introduction, either. We had a conference recently on the Fate of the Disciplines [scroll down to Recent Events] at which many luminaries wrung their hands and burrowed their brows - worried that money and the right wing will soon destroy the Humanities. Sadly, the brilliantly organized conference had no space for those that might actually be responsible for the fate of the discipline. New and recent graduates. Never mind that. Of particular interest was the talk given by Sheldon Pollock. Shelly, as always, was brilliant and intriguing. He spoke about the fate of philology in scholarship. Of service departments and lack of rigorous training in languages. Of what happens when the historian is not a polyglot. And of what happens when the scholar does not inhabit the present. Shelly told us that we have to do philology that is aware of the moment - of the political. The history I study, a friend said to me after Shelly's talk, is so far removed from the present that no way I could ever make it relevant. But, my answer was, you are not so far removed from the present. It was Shelly's last point that stuck with me. What does it mean to be a humanist today? What does it mean, to me, to be a historian?
It is not an idle question. To be honest, the usual concerns have never occupied my thoughts. Will I get a job? Will I publish enough? Will I get tenure? Perhaps, it is because that I have had a job as long as I have been in graduate school that the profession-as-trade dynamic has never taken root within me. Who am I, as a scholar? What is my role within my community? What are my responsibilities to the public? Those questions, when I had a moment to think about them, were much more intriguing to me. This blog, that some have been reading for 2 years, was sometimes an attempt to answer such questions. In a sense, as a historian, I am interested in translation - moving from one language to another, from academy to the public. I am interested in speaking, as Jaroslav Pelikan's astounding essay put it, past-ese and present-ese.
I admit that the only time I had heard of Pelikan was when he was co-awarded the Kluge Prize along with Paul Ricoeur. I promised myself that I will read Pelikan and even purchased his Whose Bible Is it?, but, never got around to it. Caleb, in a recent thread at Cliopatria noting Pelikan's passing away, recommended an essay from 1993, The Historian as Polyglot - an address given to the American Philospohical Society on their 250th anniversary. The entire essay is an example of the clarity of thought and ideas so lacking in people like me who want to call ourselves historians.
Akin to Shelly's call to philology, Pelikan talks about the necessary task of the historian:
The historian of ideas needs to be able - and, in some recognizable measure, still is able - to understand one or more of the dialects of past-ese, and by an act of historical imagination to serve as an interpreter of them, "interpreter" being, insterestingly, the very word we use both for the translator and for the historian".
...
That is as well a function of being a historical polyglot and of learning the language I have been calling here past-ese: to put our own present-ese into perspective, not by claiming to be able to jump out of our own skin, which is physically impossible, but by demonstrating the difference between the body and the mind precisely in this, that we are able in consiberable measure to jump out of our own mind-set, and thus (to invoke as well an even newer dialect of present-ese, the language of computer-ese) that we are able to "toggle" between past-ese and present-ese.
Pelikan is concerned with the role of historian and historiography but the idea of 'interpreter' can be stretched both inside the university to communications between various disciplines as well as outside the university to our actions as political and social members of society. Do note the deliciousness of his usage of computer jargon in his conclusion for my purpose here, today.
There is nothing new in the notion about scholars as public intellectuals - Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Bernard Lewis, Cornel West etc. - are readily available examples. Yet, the fact that all of the people I cited are highly polarizing figures illustrates, to me, the reticence of the average scholar to engage with the public. It is not hard to see why. The economy of mass-communication demanded sound-bites, telegenic personalities, rhetoric - all the things that a diligent scholar would avoid like the plague [especially the telegenic part]. Those that sought the glow of television cameras, had facility with words and felt fine prognosticating in op-eds got their share of snark [does anyone remember Larry Summers checklisting Cornel West's scholarship?]. Added to all that, was the severe work of it. A scholar had to seek contacts, build networks, do the things that keeps one on the journalist's rolodesk - all for no glory. No extra points come tenure time [if, ie., you were foolish enough to even say your name out loud before you got tenure].
However, mass-communication [does anyone even use that term anymore?] certainly has changed since then [you can define 'then' however you like]. We live, as O'Reilly tags it, in a Web 2.0 world. Two recent developments have profoundly affected the world of knowledge.
1. Mass digitization - through Google Library, Gutenberg Project, Digital Library projects, etc.
2. Mass publication - through wikis, blogs, tags, etc.
In this brave new world, then, what does it mean to be a humanist? What does it mean, to me, to be a historian? It should be plain that what I have in mind is the notion of a socially-engaged scholar. But, how? And to what scholarly benefit?
Yesterday, I attended a talk by Gregory Crane - a Classicist and the founder of the Perseus Project, one of the most significant digital project in all of humanities. His talk was about the digitization projects at Google, Yahoo etc. as well as Perseus Project [do see his article, What Do You Do With a Million Books?]. More significantly for me, he talked about the future of humanities - of our audiences and how will we 'talk' to them. In his talk, was the other version of a polyglot, the "Connector" - people who can stand between humanities and computer scientists - who can guide the digital channels. But, why, what is at stake? Why should someone studying 12th c. Sanskrit or medieval Indo-persian culture care about computer science geeks? Because mass-digitization is just inchoate without us as translators. It is also not something that will pause and reflect whether the sanskrit and persian sources are being done at all, or rightly.
The humanist has no choice, none, but to speak this language and to help create this knowledge system. The cost of non-action is annihilation - and I am not being over-dramatic. The concern is grave, indeed, for those of us who already are in super-sub-sects of disciplinary creeds. How will we compete? How will we attract funding? Those 12th c. Sanskrit texts must be scanned, must be annotated, must be re-imagined in their digital avatars. That medieval indo-persian culture needs digital archives and networks of scholars and readers. The computer scientist does not know the head of a critical digital edition from the tale of a critical digital edition. It is our job to engage with them. To be the interpreter. It is also, keenly, our scholarship. A blog may not get you tenure points. But a Digital Archive on Indo-Persian Culture will.
I have gone way longer than I should have [and I have lots of work to do!!] but let me conclude by saying just this: I am not speaking as someone aglow with the nirvana of technology nor am I offering a digitize or perish screed. I am simply talking about myself and the way I understand my discipline of choice. To engage with the public does not mean to just get on Charlie Rose. It also means to create a digital archive that is accessible to the general public. It means to construct networks of knowledge between various disciplines and share structural information. It means to practice philology. It means to be a polyglot. It means to not only speak past-ese and present-ese but also, future-ese.
related: Humanities today.
COMMENTS
Qalandar | May 16, 2006
Great post. One line in particular caught my eye: "The history I study, a friend said to me after Shelly’s talk, is so far removed from the present that no way I could ever make it relevant." Even apart from your rejoinder (which I agree with), your friend is evidently unfamiliar with the political stakes in the fight "over" history (specifically school textbooks) in India. In a globalized world (to use that cliche), scholarship, whether in Chicago, Delhi, or Berlin, may bear on the more localized politics of places rather distant from te above-named...
desiknitter | May 16, 2006
I like that: the historian as polyglot, and translator across time and technology. Good post, and I agree that digitization has to be harnessed to make history and the archive more accessible: one of the biggest problems in history courses in india is the lack of access to primary sources and creative discussions of the past due to hidebound and fossilized syllabi (am not talking du-jnu here). building the sourcebook will hopefully be a small step towards this democratized access?
Caleb | May 16, 2006
Bravo. No ... bravissimo.
Masale.Wallah | May 16, 2006
This article appeared in the NYT over the weekend.
ClioWeb Future-ese | May 17, 2006
[...] For historians to engage with the public, we need “to not only speak past-ese and present-ese but also, future-ese.” From Chapati Mystery’s “The Polyglot Manifesto I.” Read it. Right. Now. [...]
Saud | May 17, 2006
You forgot to include email discussion groups; I think a lot of people are interacting within the old fashioned isolated intellectual community, except now they can do it immediately. Of course, a lot of these lists are open to the public, and it is impressive how non-professional scholars on the internets are showing that they have become more than dilettantes. Have you seen the wikipedia entries on the muslim battles? Some are amazing (see battle of badr), and many of them were done by an college grad who took an elective with Donner. You know Jorn Barger, the possible inventor of the web-blog, was a computer programmer professionally but was also a huge presence in the scholarly James Joyce scene on the internet. Democratization of knowledge man, first the middle classes go to college, now the lower classes get on the internet. Soon we'll have a little bacha in bumble**** Rajasthan who will challenge Foucault's conception of power!
Land of Lime For Historians and Humanists | May 18, 2006
[...] Read Sepoy’s The Polyglot Manifesto - 1 and The Polyglot Manifesto - 2 for his insightful reflections on the challenges we face today in the academy. Any young (or even old) historian or humanities scholar should take Sepoy’s proposals seriously. [...]
elizabeth | May 19, 2006
just adding my voice to the bravos & wah-wahs. if you give people tools, they will build: it's no accident that many of the seriously politically/socially-engaged young scholars i know are suddenly blogging and wiki-ing and otherwise trying to unbuild the walls of the ivory tower (and more to the point, its libraries).
behind AotW Blog Archive Carnival! Carnival! | June 28, 2006
[...] Dr Turkel says we don’t have enough for a carnival - but how about if we stretch to include manifestoes and forth-holding; journals, umbrellas, and fora; how-to’s and workshops; hints to coming attractions; not to mention articles, ‘papers‘ or news items on the techno-classroom, academic initiatives, public history, personal archives, wikiHistory, learning with primary sources, etc. [...]
Digital History Hacks Blog Archive Digital History Year in Review | December 26, 2006
[...] Manan Ahmed penned a Polyglot Manifesto in two parts. I switched from Perl to Python. [...]
Readings in Design for Digital Humanities | ClioWeb | January 31, 2007
[...] Mystery, especially Manan’s excellent Polyglot Manifesto I and [...]
Adventures of a Desi Knitter Going back to the archives | October 20, 2007
[...] implicitly we still seem to trust in its fixity. It reminded me of my intrepid friend Sepoy’s Polyglot Manifesto again, a brilliant rumination on how historians and engage the digital world to their considerable [...]
The Polyglot Manifesto…Part 3? « The Atomic Blog | February 13, 2008
[...] The Polyglot Manifesto…Part 3? 13 02 2008 I must admit, The Polyglot Manifesto, Parts 1 and 2, presented quite an interesting argument. I think that the point that Manan Ahmed was trying to make in his two blogs speaks to the heart of the purpose of our class. The truth is, if we historians want our work to remain relevant in a technology-obsessed world, we too must become technology obsessed. We must make our archives accessible through digital collections; we must create on-line “exhibits” that present historical artifacts and materials in an interesting and engaging manner; and, we must have at least a basic knowledge of the process required to make the above two actions happen! We need to be involved in the process in order to ensure that the end result is what we envisioned. A curator cannot simply select the artifacts to be displayed in an exhibit and then walk away; they must be directly involved in the exhibit from the moment the idea is thought up, to the moment the exhibit is taken down. Therefore, a historian should be just as invovled in the creation of an on-line project, as a curator is in a exhibit. Like Manan Ahmed said, we must “not only speak past-ese and present-ese but also, future-ese.” [...]
Who do polyglot historians talk to? – Dissertation Sandbox | September 07, 2009
[...] an aspect to toggling between past-ese and present-ese that the Polyglot Manifesto does not address. Sepoy emphasizes that the polyglot "has to speak within and without [...]
Preamble « Novel History | October 10, 2009
[...] frankly, scares me.) Nevertheless, I hope somehow to be able to speak what Manan Ahmed calls “future-ese,” to be able to learn (some of) the language of the programmer over the course of this year [...]
Learning to Speak in Code « Novel History | October 10, 2009
[...] Harvey | 1 Comment “I hope somehow to be able to speak what Manan Ahmed calls “future-ese,” to be able to learn (some of) the language of the programmer over the course of this year [...]
Blog Postings on a $hoestring « Brewing History | February 08, 2010
[...] Manan Ahmed on the role of a historian: in an era of mass digitization and publication, Ahmed seems to argue that historians are shooting themselves in the foot if they don’t move towards becoming an online presence and asserting themselves as web historians. Not to rehash any debates from Clio 1, but he’s right. Who else can make sure that sound historical work and research can have an online voice other than a historian. Although some professionals outside our field can explore historical questions successfully, more often than not journalists, bloggers, and web-trolls do not make for good historical work. I believe Ahmed is merely suggesting that historians make a concerted effort to know mark-ups and web design, but to work with professional programmers to create online work that meets our satisfaction. In this light, his shout-out to GMU’s CHNM reminds me that I made a great decision to attend here. [...]
found in translation « Historia Computabilis | February 08, 2010
[...] knowledge, they prefer to isolate themselves in the “Footnote tower.” In this sense, The Polyglot Manifesto is a nice attempt to translate or to interpret the meaning of Jaroslav Pelikan’s article [...]
The Eye of the Beholder Blog Archive A little inspiration may go a long way. | February 09, 2010
[...] Ahmed' s “The Polyglot Manifesto” before and I am always struck by the following passage in Part 1, “It is our job to engage with them. To be the interpreter. It is also, keenly, our [...]
Drinking the Digital Kool Aid | Rungiraffe | February 01, 2011
[...] of us just embarking on our careers. Manan Ahmed’s two-part blog post, The Polyglot Manifesto I and II, spoke most eloquently about the need for additional skill (namely technical) required of [...]
Announcement: CM BOOK! | May 10, 2011
[...] mode, the future and past of “academic blogging” [curious folks can look up this and this as two early examples]. One part of this engagement was my insistence that “blogs” were [...]