Passwords: Philology, Security, Authentication

摘要

This book is ostensibly about the many intersections of the humanities and technology, primarily in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In truth, it is a sustained attack on the digital humanities as the latest form of "cryptophilology," Lennon's term for humanities scholarship in service to, or in collusion with, military and national security interests. In the preface, Lennon observes (p. xvi) that "the historical braid joining modern cryptology as a state security practice with modern philology as its literary other has never completely unraveled." That would have been a marvelous premise for a history of the relationship between technology and the humanities. Unfortunately, Lennon uses it as a platform for delivering a philippic against computational philology and, by extension, the larger field of digital humanities. The thunderous conclusion to one paragraph in particular, makes this clear: "That even after more than a decade of energetic speculation, the phrase and the concept 'digital humanities' still frustrates attempts at provisional definition, let alone precision, is a liability and a predicament for anyone who has come to realize that sustained shouting about novelty only deafens" (pp. xiii-xiv). Nevertheless, Lennon does attempt a provisional definition by equating computational philology, a sub-field of digital humanities, with digital humanities itself throughout his work. Because of their technical and experimental nature, subjects such as stylometry, machine translation, natural language processing, and the like are convenient targets for someone wanting to portray digital humanities in broad strokes as a soulless field populated by gullible and naive nerds incapable of appreciating truth and beauty.