At the recently completed Wolfram Technology Conference, there was a meet up about the humanities and Wolfram Language. I attended because I have an interest in this topic. I gave a talk at the conference on Hermeneutics and Wolfram Language. (The text of the talk is provide in the attached notebook.) It was pointed out that most of the developers and managers at Wolfram Research do not have a background in the arts or humanities.
Among other things, this issue was discussed.
President Obama had used the phrase "they gave the last full measure of devotion" in several of his speeches.
There were two questions:
1: Should an AI system be able to recognize that this is a quote from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?
2: (The more interesting question) Should an AI system know that this phrase referred to death?
For the first question, given the fact that the Gettysburg Address is in the public domain, it should be easy enough to write code in WL that would scan a document looking for quotes of this nature. It would be a useful project to expand the source material to Shakespeare and the King James translation of the Bible, since most of us, one way or another, are using words or phrases from these two documents every day.
For the second question, the basic idea is that an AI system should be able to understand metaphor. The general consensus was that an AI system should be able to understand this metaphor, and by extension, any metaphor.
If there is to ever be a "computational literature", this problem needs to be solved. Current functionality in Wolfram Language, and as far as I know, code using WL, is inadequate to this task. It does pretty will at the "Dick and Jane" level, or for basic cook-book texts, but not for anything as complex as Austen, let alone Beckett, Joyce, Shakespeare, or Dickens.
Note that most of you know exactly what I was talking about when I used the phrase "Dick and Jane", but a computer would be flummoxed.
The same thing is true for the fine arts and music.
I know that WL has been used successfully for making patterns for carpets and wallpaper, but these are crafts, not art. Fractal images are interesting, but they carry no emotional content.
Similarly, I am familiar with many types of algorithmically generated music, but the results are only "music" in a very broad sense. As a replacement for MUZAK or a background to a computer game, they may be interesting, but as art, they are far below the level of a Robert Shechtman (my first composition teacher), let alone Stravinsky, Mozart or Beethoven.
I am also aware that there is software that can analyze J. S. Bach's entire output and generate chorales that 'sound like' the real thing. This is not that great an accomplishment: any student who completes a course in music theory can do the same thing. Again, there is no emotional content, and an expert would not be fooled.
I could go on with more examples.
The point is this: Stephen Wolfram has stated many times that there is or soon will be a "computational X" for any field. I think that this is naive. At best, WL can handle some peripheral aspect of a humanity (music, art, history, etc.), but not its core questions.
For example, WL can provide maps, facts and figures for events in History. It cannot provide any insight into motivations, context, or consequences. For people who only are exposed to History in K-12, History seems to be about memorizing names and dates, but this is a failing of the educational system and not a realistic understanding of what it means to study history.
Stephen Wolfram has expressed the desire to extend the types of users of WRI's technology beyond scientists and engineers. Right now, Machine Learning and Algorithms seem to hold a lot of promise.
However, from what I have seen, read, and experienced, the existing level of technology and its reasonable extensions cannot begin to address the central concerns of the humanities, and to pretend otherwise will do nothing except to alienate those people we wish to include.
I am posting this because I would be interested in comments or suggestions.
geo3rge
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