Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 5.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2023-05-08 19:35:01+00:00
From: maurizio lana <maurizio.lana@uniupo.it>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 36.561: on scientising the humanities, including by digital means
hi Willard,
i think that - don't know if by direct impulse or not from the STEM
disciplines - the humanities are slowly adopting an "evidence based"
approach to the reading and interpretation of the textual material,
thanks to the (humbly named) "text analysis": that is conclusions about
the meaning of a text are drawn on the basis of evidences - not the
interpretive genius of the scholar.
obvious that we can discuss what an evidence is in the textual realm:
but we discuss if those very words ["sd edw wd ww dwdw"] are or are not
an evidence for a proposed conclusion/interpretation.
much is not going this way in the textual studies but i think that is an
important direction because when operating this way the text is
conceived and treated as a type of data, hence analysing a text is a
type of data analysis.
(nothing new under the sun, all this starts in 1247 in Paris with the
production of the first concordance of the Bible by Hugues de St-Cher:
read the text by the text. this shows that scientising the humanities
doesn't necessarily imply digitising them rather treating the text as
data Lutoslawski docet)
Maurizio
Il 01/05/23 11:02, Humanist ha scritto:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 36, No. 561.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to:humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2023-05-01 08:53:22+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty<willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: on scientising the humanities, including by digital means
>
> Perhaps Barbara Herrnstein Smith's "Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts,
> Collisions, Negotiations" (Common Knowledge 22.3, September 2016) is
> known to many here. Somehow I missed it until this morning. It is worth
> the candle, as we technologically advanced folk like to say to signal
> that we know a thing or two.
>
> Anyhow, in this article Herrnstein Smith addresses "efforts on the part
> of scholars in humanities disciplines to introduce concepts, methods, or
> findings from the natural sciences into their home fields...". She
> brings in specific "models of the dynamics of intellectual history",
> with particular and important emphasis on Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and
> Development of a Scientific Fact (1935 in German, 1979, in English).
> Digital humanities gets considerable attention, "clearly a related
> development... not so much to make the humanities more scientific
> (though that is often an element) as to attune... practices more closely
> to the increasing power and presence of information technologies." Smith
> is working at a distance from digital humanities, and so (with some
> exceptions) those feature whom an American literary critic and theorist
> would tend to see feature, Kathrine Hales in particular.
>
> Herrnstein Smith concludes:
>
>> There is little reason to think the humanities will fold themselves
>> into the natural sciences and, I believe, no good reason to think
>> they should. But there are reasons to think the new hybrid approaches
>> will survive and prosper... Significantly, practitioners have begun
>> to respond to external criticism constructively rather than with
>> defensive hostility and also to engage in discriminating internal
>> criticism rather than indiscriminate mutual puffing. [...]
>>
>> There is much in what I have described here to give us pause and
>> perhaps to make us weep. Two further considerations, however, can be
>> heartening. First, there is good reason to think that, even with the
>> attenuation of “print culture” and the flat-out disappearance of
>> “classics,” “English,” and even “philosophy,” humans across the globe
>> will still be inclined to recall, savor, and ponder what fellow
>> humans have done, made, and articulated, no matter how—or via what
>> medium—it is transmitted. Second, although desegregations and new
>> mixtures typically elicit fears of a homogenized or mongrelized
>> future, cultural and biological history remind us that hybrids often
>> turn out to be sturdier than their ancestors and, indeed, to be
>> especially favored in surprising ways. The traditional Western
>> disciplines, both the sciences and the humanities, are being severely
>> shaken up by important intellectual and technological developments,
>> and the attendant collisions of aims, styles, and perspectives can be
>> locally painful. But the disciplines—again, all of them—are also
>> being put together in myriad new ways. The new disciplinary
>> configurations are not, in my view, moving toward ultimate harmony or
>> unity. But they may be opening out to intellectual landscapes more
>> interesting than most of us imagine.
> For me--perhaps few would agree--what jumps out particularly in
> this article is a quotation from neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee, who
> asks, "When does neuroscience provide deeper descriptive texture to our
> knowledge of aesthetics, and when does it deliver added explanatory
> force?” and comments:
>
>> Knowing that the pleasure of viewing a beautiful painting is
>> correlated with activity within the orbito-frontal cortex . . . adds
>> biologic texture to our understanding of the rewards of aesthetic
>> experiences. However, it is not obvious that it . . . advances our
>> understanding of the psychological nature of that reward. For
>> neuroscience to make important contributions to aesthetics, the
>> possibility of an inner psychophysics has to be taken seriously.
> The foregoing is intended only to whet your palate, which I trust it has
> by the time you read this. Comments most welcome--after you've read the
> thing and digested it inwardly, please.
>
> Yours,
> WM
>
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk
------------------------------------------------------------------------
la Repubblica promuove lo sviluppo della cultura e la ricerca scientifica e
tecnica.
la Repubblica detta le norme generali sull'istruzione ed istituisce scuole
statali per tutti gli ordini e gradi.
Costituzione della Repubblica Italiana, art. 9 e 33
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maurizio Lana
Università del Piemonte Orientale
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
Piazza Roma 36 - 13100 Vercelli
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