AHA Session 165
Saturday, January 9, 2027: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Napoleon Ballroom B3 (Sheraton New Orleans, 3rd Floor)
Chair:
Christian Flow, Mississippi State University
Panel:
Paul Babinski, University of Georgia
Stephen Blair, researcher
Teddy Delwiche, Heidelberg University
Cynthia Houng, independent scholar
Rajeev Kumar Kinra, Northwestern University
Libby O'Neil, Mississippi State University
Jonathan Strassfeld, Johns Hopkins University
Stephen Blair, researcher
Teddy Delwiche, Heidelberg University
Cynthia Houng, independent scholar
Rajeev Kumar Kinra, Northwestern University
Libby O'Neil, Mississippi State University
Jonathan Strassfeld, Johns Hopkins University
This creatively formatted roundtable brings together scholars of different periods (antiquity to modernity) and textual traditions to consider the problem of “scale” not for the large language models of today but for the linguistic and textual scholars of yesteryear. Participants will make short remarks based on precirculated readings. Please email the moderator for background items and texts.
Session Abstract
The problem of “scaling”—achieving and reconciling different dimensions of observation and experience—has purchase in pursuits as diverse as geography, climatology, visual studies, economics and artificial intelligence. Taking cues from the recent ubiquity of the large language model, this panel examines the concept’s pertinence for scholars of language. Drawing on research from antiquity all the way through the twentieth century it asks first what “scale” has been and might be, before turning specifically to how those who have devoted themselves to the analysis and exegesis of words and texts have conceived the size, the superability, and the limits of their investigations. How was the research of an individual scholar situated with regard to the labors of an institution, a generation, an era? What tasks have been considered too big, too small, and how have notions like “finitude” and “infinitude” proved labile in time and space? How does the notion of “scale” fit with prior work in the history of information around generationally recurring plaints about "too much"? Taken together, the contributions deliver a kind of pre-history of the “scaling” challenges faced by modern technologies and modern economies. It is a pre-history unearthed from a perhaps unexpected place: the studies, libraries, and archives of the logophiles of yesteryear.
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