OK, a stupid question:
1) I do not understand in the context it is used here the term "Humanity". What does it mean?
2) What is "Digital Humanity"?
If I remember, Snow talk about science and art. Here you use "humanity". Does it mean that "Art" = "Humanity". If yes, then why there are two words for the same concept? If "Humanity" is "Art", than "Science" is its opposition ("Anti-humanity" like in "Cat's Cradle"), isn't it? I have an impression that the mix of these two ideas happened because art deals with human nature (our feelings etc.), whereas science deals with soulless nature. Well, how in this case to be with, for example, human anatomy, or even more - human neuroscience? Science is interesting in human nature as much as art.
Snow missed another realm of human relation with the world - religion. To have a more or less complete analysis we have operate with: 1) Religion, 2) Art, 3) Science. There are three (at least) ways to explore and explain our life and ourselves. Definitely, they are different by tools (or ways, if you wish) used for perception and explanation, but all of them stem from the same one root - myth. That is why, their opposition is superficial (I'd say operational). I have a strong feeling that if we look the history of these three "cultures" we will find that they go in parallel during the whole human history.
Hi Boris:
ReplyDeleteI think in the context of this seminar we are looking at the traditional humanities-philosophy, linguistics, art, literature, music, etc- and how the study of them is changing through the use of digital tools and resources.
From wikipedia:
The Digital Humanities are an area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities.
Dear Dahlia: Thank you very much for your reply. I almost do not expect somebody will do it. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting combination: music, literature, and, for example, linguistic. Their opposition to science really confuse me. I always think that linguistic (or philosophy) is a science.
There are some big terms and ideas here. You ask some good questions. In one of the digital humanities books I'm reading, there was an essay addressing some of this head on. (I was just reading this on my phone on the train this morning.) The idea that we shouldn't simplify the 'human' vs. the machine (or the digital). That is, humans have always used tools -- that's one definition of civilization, I suppose. And so if we are using digital tools (and doing more and more work of our thinking and research online), technology isn't as much opposed to the human, as it becomes part of us. I'm not sure I buy this argument entirely, but there is something to be said for this idea. As in your post, we need to think about these large terms to make sense of where we are at with the digital humanities. Even in the history of science, there was the sense in nineteenth-century science becoming ever more positivistic and precise. There would be more and more precision, and the objective data would speak for itself -- even without human interpretation. And low and behold in the early 20th-century century comes relativity, quantum theory, and later systems theory and chaos theory, all filtered through paradigmatic science pace Kuhn. So it may be, as it turns out, nature is profoundly strange at the level of the quanta, right? (Even the great Richard Feynman once said you can't really understand quantum theory -- just use the equations and generate the right solution). And it takes humans to interpret and make sense of raw data.... Thus, practitioners of digital humanities, it seems to me, can benefit from looking at the long history of science and its relation to datasets, both large and small, for guidance on how to proceed....
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