On the afternoon of November 14, 2019, a lecture entitled “The Computational Origins of English: Adam Smith and Rise of a Discipline” was held at School of Foreign Languages. The speaker was Professor Mike Hill of the state university of New York at Albany. Faculty numbers, undergraduates, postgraduates and doctoral students attended the lecture. The lecture was presided by doctoral supervisor, Gao Jihai.
At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Mike briefly introduced Adam Smith and his ideological achievements, and introduced the body part of the lecture. He introduced the case that three confusing words can express related emotions, thus to explain the connection principle of philosophy. He pointed out that Adam Smith showed intangible connections among things, and found inherent order in chaos through the “invisible hand”. Later, he pointed out that Adam Smith took table and chair as an example to show that the real and tangible things are not immutable, but exist in the form of continuous change. He went on to point to the impact of the printing revolution on literary studies, suggesting that the printing boom, while allowing more books to be published, has greatly degrading writing.
At the end of the lecture, Professor Mike patiently answered the questions raised by the audiences, and conducted in-depth discussions on the impact of the printing revolution on the circulation of Shakespeare’s works, the issue of high-quality reading in the context of the popularization of electronic books, and the future of digital humanities and literary studies.
This lecture was exciting. Professor Mike’s profound knowledge, clear logic and broad vision provided the audience with a grand academic feast and also provided them with a new direction of literary research. (author: Yang Qing)
