Bringing Computation into Cultural Theory: Four Good Reasons (and One Bad One)

Abstract:We used to talk. By "we" I mean cultural sociologists and scholars in the humanities, and by "used to talk" I mean acknowledge each other's existence, at times perhaps even generously so. There are different versions as to what happened, one of which is a bit more intellectual than the other, although neither of which are entirely right. The more intellectual version is that for a brief spell in the late 1980s and early 1990s it looked like our interests might converge. At around the same time, many of us stopped being scolds about popular culture, deciding instead that it was more fruitful and interesting to engage the world than to police it. Some of us were also asking similar questions, be it about the role of authors and their ability (or lack thereof) to enforce, guide, or push readers into certain meanings, or about the role of interpretive communities and groups either to buffer against the impingement of those meanings or to generate localized meanings all anew. So we congregated around folks such as I. A. Richards, Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss, Mikhail Bakhtin, Stanley Fish, Roland Barthes, or Michel Foucault, and sometimes we even cited each other too, and then it just all kind of petered out.