The machine-readable transcendentalists: Cultural history on the computer
Tóm tắt
THIS ESSAY reports on an effort to integrate statistics and the computer into the humanities classroom. In History 55, “Culture and Community: The Worlds of Emerson, Dickinson, and Thoreau,” at Amherst College, students were asked to carry out quantitative analyses of the U.S. census of 1850 for the towns of Amherst and Concord, Massachusetts. This assignment was conceived as a project in social history, through which students would reconstruct the contours of community life. But the investigation of the census transformed the main lines of the course, even the ways in which students interpreted the writings of the Transcendentalists. For the census represented not only a register of society, but also a cultural text produced in that society and manifesting a distinctive world view, that of the emerging social scientists of Victorian America. To study the census was thus to uncover the origins of the very frame of mind, against which writers like Emerson and Thoreau reacted. And so, a course that began in the attempt to bridge the humanities and social sciences eventually became self-reflexive: the origins of the “two cultures” lay in the very time and place we were studying. Recovering that history proved liberating. In the course of quantifying society, students transcended the intellectual divide between the humanities and sciences and achieved a deeper historical consciousness.
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