New methodologies and challenging
ideas have spread through the arts and humanities. The study of literature is no longer – if it ever was – simply the study and evaluation
of poems, novels and plays. It is also the study of the ideas, issues
and difficulties which arise in any literary text and in its interpretation. Other arts and humanities subjects have changed in analogous
ways.
With these changes, new problems have emerged. The ideas and
issues behind these radical changes in the humanities are often
presented without reference to wider contexts or as theories which
you can simply ‘add on’ to the texts you read. Certainly, there’s
nothing wrong with picking out selected ideas or using what comes
to hand – indeed, some thinkers have argued that this is, in fact, all
we can do. However, it is sometimes forgotten that each new idea
comes from the pattern and development of somebody’s thought and
it is important to study the range and context of their ideas. Against
theories ‘floating in space’, the Routledge Critical Thinkers series places
key thinkers and their ideas firmly back in their contexts.
More than this, these books reflect the need to go back to the
thinker’s own texts and ideas. Every interpretation of an idea, even
the most seemingly innocent one, offers its own ‘spin’, implicitly or
explicitly. To read only books on a thinker, rather than texts by that
thinker, is to deny yourself a chance of making up your own mind.
Sometimes what makes a significant figure’s work hard to approach is
not so much its style or content as the feeling of not knowing where
to start. The purpose of these books is to give you ‘way in’ by offering
an accessible overview of these thinkers’ ideas and works and by
guiding your further reading, starting with each thinker’s own texts.

Page viii SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

Stuart Hall by James Procter

2004

http://www.polkfolk.com/docs/Ref-Library/Hall,%20Stuart/Stuart%20Hall%20-%20Routledge%20Critical%20Thinkers.pdf

An interesting explanation of research methodologies

Links:
Wordwise Hymns
The Cyber Hymnal

Note: We have little information about James Proctor, including the dates of his birth and death. (At a guess, I’d say about 1840 and 1900, respectively.) However, the story behind this gospel song is one of the most remarkable in the history of hymnody. You can check it out in the Wordwise Hymns link. The song was published in 1903. I’ve sung it as a solo many times, and in the 1950′s I had the privilege of meeting Robert Harkness, the composer of the tune.

It’s true. People try many different ways to find peace of mind and hope for the future. Some engage in good works and community service. Some focus on the acquisition of wealth and property. Some do all they can to be popular and win the praise of others. Some indulge in the proverbial wine, women and song. But for all this, there’s still something lacking. And Jim Proctor found he couldn’t make sense of life with the way he was living, and the belief system he’d espoused. There had to be something (and Someone) more.

CH-2) My soul is night, my heart is steel—
I cannot see, I cannot feel;
For light, for life, I must appeal
In simple faith to Jesus.

The book of Ecclesiastes deals with this subject. It records a sermon preached by King Solomon in old age, looking back on his life (Ecc. 1:1). He had tried all of the things mentioned above, and more, but found them empty. The word “vanity” is found 28 times in the book, a word meaning a breath or a vapour. Pleasure, wealth, power, and so on, all seem as fragile and temporary as a mist that dissipates and vanishes away.

All of that relates to life “under the sun”–another expression Solomon uses often (27 times). It refers to this mortal life, from the womb to the tomb. If that’s all there is to life, then it is indeed vanity, a mere nothing. But after Solomon has clearly established that point, he describes another dimension of life that can give it meaning and purpose.

That is, that we cannot understand life without factoring in God and eternity. We are accountable to God for what we’ve done with our lives, and there is an eternal destiny beyond the grave to prepare for (Ecc. 12:13-14). The Lord Jesus dealt with this when He told His hearers to “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matt. 6:19-21; cf. vs. 33), and Paul likewise sounded a similar note (Col. 3:1-4; cf. I Tim. 6:7).

After struggling for a long time on the wrong path, Mr. Proctor found that the Lord Jesus Christ, in His Person and work, made sense of a lot of things in his life that were otherwise dark and unknowable.

CH-3) He died, He lives, He reigns, He pleads;
There’s love in all His words and deeds;
There’s all a guilty sinner needs
Forevermore in Jesus.

The men Proctor had associated with previously were agnostics and atheists. They’d no doubt think he’d lost his senses, if he left his association with them and trusted Christ as his Saviour. But he did it. And wrote:

CH-4) Though some should sneer, and some should blame,
I’ll go with all my guilt and shame;
I’ll go to Him because His name,
Above all names, is Jesus.

Questions:
1) A philosopher wrote that each person has “a God-shaped blank” in his soul. What does this mean?

2) What kinds of priorities and activities will enable the Christian to lay up treasures in heaven?

Links:
Wordwise Hymns
The Cyber Hymnal

People and Paperware

• Nadia Anwar presented a paper on Semantic Data Integration for Francisella tularensi Proteomic and Genomic Data. This described experiences of developing a system for converting proteomics data in Excel to RDF, and what the benefits were.
• Heiko Dietze presented a paper on GoWeb: A semantic search engine for the life science web. Have a look at GoWeb query for the hexokinase enzyme for an example of the currently capability of GoWeb.
• Simon Jupp presented a paper on Knowledge Representation for Web Navigation which described why the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) is sometimes a more suitable language for modelling knowledge than OWL and RDF – see also SKOS in the context of Semantic Web Deployment by Alistair Miles

70 people registered to attend SWAT4LS in total, many familiar names and faces, plus some new people I’ve never met before:

• Chemist James Procter, University of Dundee, enlightened me about DAS [1,2] – which has until now, been a bit of a Web service mystery to me. Sometimes it is much quicker to learn about something by asking an expert face-to-face, rather than reading the papers or playing with the software.
• Chemist Nico Adams, University of Cambridge. Only got a chance to briefly say hello, but maybe we’ll get a chance to talk more next time… Nico has written some more comprehensive notes on the workshop here and here.
• Christopher Baker, University of New Brunswick, one of the editors of the semweb-lifesci-book. On his way from Singapore to Canada (phew!)
• Icelandic bioinformatician Gudmundur Thorisson, University of Leicester. Nice to meet you and talk about genealogy in Iceland and DOI-goodness… [3]

Software

The workshop material had some adverts for publicationslist.org and a.nnotate.com which are potentially interesting tools that might be worth investigating. Publications list looks like a citeulike clone with the emphasis on claiming publications as your own, then publishing them as a list. A.nnotate.com looks like a handy tool for annotating pdf (and other) files… probably worth a look.

SWAT4LS finished with an entertaining keynote by Mark Wilkinson followed by a panel discussion hosted by Phil Lord titled: “If the semantic web is so good, how come most people use OBO for ontologies and PERL for data integration?” (Heh!) The simple answer was (by a fairly wide consensus) that the semantic web technology remains largely unproven. OBO is currently easier to use (!?) as well as having a larger number of more influential users (at least in the biomedical community). As Ben Good puts it (in a slightly different context), this makes semantic web technology either:

1. pitifully insignificant or
2. primed with the opportunity for dramatic growth…

We will probably have to wait a while longer to find out, maybe there is a third option? In the meantime, the SWAT4LS organisers (Albert Burger, Adrian Paschke, Paolo Romano and Andrea Splendiani) have published the workshop proceedings on http://www.ceur-ws.org (volume 435) with the best of these papers being published in a special issue by BMC Bioinformatics.

References

1. Andreas Prlic, Thomas Down, Eugene Kulesha, Robert Finn, Andreas Kahari and Tim Hubbard (2007). Integrating sequence and structural biology with DAS. BMC Bioinformatics 8 (1). doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-333
2. Robin Dowell, Rodney Jokerst, Allen Day, Sean Eddy and Lincoln Stein (2001). The distributed annotation system. BMC Bioinformatics 2 (1). DOI:10.1186/1471-2105-2-7
3. Norman Paskin (2005). Digital object identifiers for scientific data. Data Science Journal 4, 12+. DOI:10.2481/dsj.4.12

[Creative Commons licensed picture of a statue of the scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell in Edinburgh taken by David Farrer]