Re: [emacs-humanities] Why Emacs-humanities?

[Joe Corneli]

Hi everyone,

Since this is turning into a thread of introductions — which also seems
like a good way to address the "why" question in the subject — here’s
some info about me.

I was first introduced to Emacs when was 16, in the context of a C
programming course.  I later used it to write several papers and an
undergraduate thesis in mathematics.  Since typing lots of symbols like
$\alpha$ and so on was starting to hurt my fingers, I took several
steps:

- I bought a Kinesis Classic keyboard
- I learned the Dvorak layout
- I dipped into Emacs Lisp and created some custom functions and
  bindings.

Even a few of the nominal "editor macros", I’m sure, but functions soon
became more effective.  Thus began my introduction to LISP and
functional programming.  I found the Emacs mailing lists help-gnu-emacs,
gnu-emacs-sources, and emacs-devel to be very helpful in supporting my
learning curve.

This experience led to a hypothesis: would it be possible to learn other
subjects (like mathematics) the same way I learned LISP, i.e., through
online discussions in FLOSS communities?  My participation in the online
community PlanetMath.org contributed significantly to my outlook — but
it’s safe to say that without my experience with the Emacs community, as
proof positive that this kind of learning could work for programming,
the hypothesis wouldn’t have taken shape.  BTW, I was able to get jobs
as a LISP and, later, Clojure programmer; this is part of what I mean by
proof!  Ultimately I got a PhD for a thesis on "Peer Produced Peer
Learning" that explored my hypothesis in a mathematics setting.  I can’t
say it’s been fully validated, but it hasn’t been invalidated either;
and the work was considered sufficient for the doctoral degree, and so
set me on a career path.

Peer produced peer learning is a mouthful, so we started talking about
"paragogy".  Subsequently, the media scholar Howard Rheingold suggested
"peeragogy" as a somewhat more accessible variant.  Nowadays,
peeragogy.org continues to explore related themes.  We are working on a
4th Edition of the Peeragogy Handbook, presently: and, bringing this
full circle, in a way, I’m keen to use Org Mode and Emacs to "drive"
this edition; the previous technical editing workflow was based on
Markdown, Pandoc, and LaTeX.  We’ve also been using some ideas and
methods from peeragogy in the formation of ERG, and I think there will
be some fruitful synergies there.

I also have some speculative plans for a 5th Edition of the Handbook
that would go further in the direction of graph-based knowledge
management and semantic markup.  This hearkens back to a project I
worked on outside of any formal institution, called Arxana, first
prototyped in 2005, with a few reboot editions since then.  Arxana was
meant to be an open source implementation of Ted Nelson’s "Xanadu"
ideas.  Among other things, it had backlinks "before they were cool" —
as well as some features for disassembling and assembling documents out
of pieces.  It hasn’t yet reached a shipable production standard — which
is something I’d like to address in the next year or two! — but we did
use it to support work on a 2017 research paper "Modelling the Way
Mathematics Is Actually Done" that looks at the informal logic of
mathematical proof.

I was also keen to use it for creative writing, in a piece drawing on
"collage" and "cut-up" ideas, inspired by the work of William
S. Burroughs.  I wrote a reasonable amount of source text, and I hoped
to motivate myself to keep developing the Arxana system through this use
case — and, who knows, that may still happen!  Even though progress has
been decidedly glacial, this project did lead me to another interesting
peer learning experience, namely weekly participation in the Minneapolis
Writers Workshop for a period of time in the mid-00’s.

All considered I’m a hybrid between mathematician, programmer, writer,
and, informally, a student of philosophy.  Formally, I’m now a Research
Fellow in Ethical AI at Oxford Brookes University.  I’m also the
director of a company — not currently trading, but if we’re lucky, still
"bootstrapping" with a collection of related informal research projects
— aiming to bring AI together free/libre/open source materials.

Here’s another telling of this story in slightly more evocative
language: http://metameso.org/~joe/docs/making.html

Joe
-- 
Dr Joseph A. Corneli (https://github.com/holtzermann17)

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