ABSTRACT
My title refers to a famous disagreement between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis, in which the two scholars battled publicly over what Snow had identified as the “two cultures” of science and the humanities and which strand would be given necessary precedence in the future of the human race.1 It is hardly worth pointing out that their debate was never fully resolved. Given current understandings of epistemology, scholars in the humanities at least would surely insist on multiplicities of intellectual and other cultures rather than a binary. But even though prominent scholars have pointed to their inutility and lamented their effects on the next generation of scholars, gaps between different kinds of researchers in the humanities are very real. Recent public exchanges have focused on the state of research in the production of electronic texts by humanities scholars and classrooms, with proponents weighing in from all points of the spectrum on the relative merits of the body of research being produced by or available to scholars. Vigorous debates still take place about the roles of humans and machines in the production of text even with the visibly inexorable development of electronic publishing, the growing body of computer-assisted content analysis of linguistic corpora, the ubiquity of personal computers, and the body of personal and scholarly narratives about their use. There are arguments on three levels: “should we or shouldn’t we,”
Peter Sands University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
“what meaning do we assign to this phenomenon,” and “what’s next.” Like any meme, these discussions reflect an idea spreading on its own throughout the culture and the discipline: that new research initiatives and ideas are needed. They also reflect the difficult tension between a desire for positive changes and a rejection of existing paradigms. In this chapter, I will focus briefly on the specific case of current research in computer-mediated composition teaching, then suggest one direction researchers in the humanities in general need to pursue vigorously: the empirical. Computers and composition is a subdiscipline well positioned for prominence: Electronic discourse is primarily written discourse; the field has as its object of study both that discourse and effective use of emerging technologies in teaching and research, and the field itself is nascent-it can still be shaped.
