From: “Modeling: A Study in Words and Meanings” by Willard McCarty

Out on site, you were never parted from your plans. They were your Bible. They got dog-eared, yellowed, smeared with mud, peppered with little holes from where you had unrolled them on the ground. But although so sacred, the plans were only the start. Once you got out there on the site everything was different. No matter how carefully done, the plans could not foresee the variables. It was always interesting, this moment when you saw for the first time the actual site rather than the idealised drawings of it.

Kate Grenville, The Idea of Perfection (Sydney: Picador, 1999): 62–3

Introduction

The question of modeling arises naturally for humanities computing from the prior question of what its practitioners across the disciplines have in common. What are they all doing with their computers that we might find in their diverse activities indications of a coherent or cohesible practice? How do we make the best, most productive sense of what we observe? There are, of course, many answers: practice varies from person to person, from project to project, and ways of construing it perhaps vary even more. In this chapter I argue for modeling as a model of such a practice. I have three confluent goals: to identify humanities computing with an intellectual ground shared by the older disciplines, so that we may say how and to what extent our field is of as well as in the humanities, how it draws from and adds to them; at the same time to reflect experience with computers “in the wild”; and to aim at the most challenging problems, and so the most intellectually rewarding future now imaginable.

My primary concern here is, as Confucius almost said, that we use the correct word for the activity we share lest our practice go awry for want of understanding (Analects 13.3). Several words are on offer. By what might be called a moral philology I examine them, arguing for the most popular of these, “modeling.” The nominal form, “model”, is of course very useful and even more popular, but for reasons I will adduce, its primary virtue is that properly defined it defaults to the present participle, its semantic lemma. Before getting to the philology I discuss modeling in the light of the available literature and then consider the strong and learned complaints about the term.

Background

Let me begin with provisional definitions¹. By “modeling” I mean the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models, a “model” I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new. These two senses follow Clifford Geertz’s analytic distinction between a denotative “model of” such as a grammar describing the features of a language, and an exemplary “model for” such as an architectural plan².³ In both cases, as the literature consistently emphasizes, a model is by nature a simplified and therefore fictional or idealized representation, often taking quite a rough-and-ready form: hence the term “tinker toy” model from physics, accurately suggesting play, relative crudity, and heuristic purpose.⁴ By nature modeling defines a ternary relationship in which it mediates epistemologically, between modeler and modeled, researcher and data or theory and the world.⁵ Since modeling is fundamentally relational, the same object may in different contexts play either role: thus, e.g., the grammar may function prescriptively, as a model for correct usage, the architectural plan descriptively, as a model of an existing style. The distinction also reaches its vanishing point in the convergent purposes of modeling: the model of exists to tell us that we do not know, the model for to give us what we do not yet have. Models realize.

Bibliography