http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/magazine/103086/scientism-humanities-knowledge-theory-everything-arts-science The conflict between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften goes back at least two centuries, and became intensified as ambitious, sometimes impatient researchers proposed to introduce natural scientific concepts and methods into the study of human psychology and human social behavior. Their efforts, and the attitudes of unconcealed disdain that often inspired them, prompted a reaction, from Vico to Dilthey and into our own time: the insistence that some questions are beyond the scope of natural scientific inquiry, too large, too complex, too imprecise, and too important to be addressed by blundering over-simplifications. From the nineteenth-century ventures in mechanistic psychology to… ]]> Thu, 17 May 2012 03:42:13 -0700 http://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/magazine/103086/scientism-humanities-knowledge-theory-everything-arts-science http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/05/on-the-origins-of-the-arts RICH AND SEEMINGLY BOUNDLESS as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about reality external to our bodies, is pitifully small. Our vision is limited to a tiny segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, where wave frequencies in their fullness range from gamma radiation at the upper end, downward to the ultralow frequency used in some specialized forms of communication. We see only a tiny bit in the middle of the whole, which we refer to as the “visual spectrum.” Our optical apparatus… ]]> Sat, 21 Apr 2012 05:37:47 -0700 http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/05/on-the-origins-of-the-arts http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org//journal-of-digital-humanities The first Journal of Digital Humanities is out: http://t.co/aJtT704N and with it a new, postpublication model of peer review. – William G. Thomas (wgthomas3) http://twitter.com/wgthomas3/status/187981968548438016 ]]> Mon, 09 Apr 2012 04:24:31 -0700 http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org//journal-of-digital-humanities http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/852 Reports of the demise of the humanities are exaggerated, suggest these panelists, but there may be reason to fear its loss of relevance. Three scholars whose work touches a variety of disciplines and with wide knowledge of the worlds of academia and publishing ponder the meaning and mission of the humanities in the digital age. Getting a handle on the term itself proves somewhat elusive. Alison Byerly invokes those fields involved with “pondering the deep questions of humanity,” such as languages, the arts, literature, philosophy and religion. Steven Pinker boils it down to “the study of the products of the… ]]> Sun, 06 Mar 2011 13:02:02 -0700 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/852 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/23 The field of the digital humanities embraces various scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology as well as being engaged in digital media production. Perhaps most notably, in what some are describing as a ‘computational turn’, it has seen techniques and methods drawn from computer science being used to produce new ways of understanding and approaching humanities texts. But just as interesting as what computer science has to offer the humanities is the question of what the humanities have to offer computer science. Do the humanities really need to draw so heavily on computer… ]]> Wed, 02 Mar 2011 07:36:29 -0700 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/23 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/09/writing-off-last-palaeographer-university Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently that it was to close the UK's only chair of palaeography. From ­September, the current holder of the chair, Professor David Ganz, will be out of a job, and the subject will no longer exist as a separate academic discipline in British universities. Its survival will now depend entirely on the whim of classicists and medievalists studying in other fields.

The decision took everyone by ­surprise. "It… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 10:04:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/09/writing-off-last-palaeographer-university http://www.thecommonreview.org/feature-articles/gottschalls-problem.html These are fighting words. But can the scientific model really be applied to literature? Some of the scholars I talked to regard science’s push into the humanities as an intrusion, an attempt to explain the magic of human achievement with the most indelicate tools. Gottschall is calling for a science of the humanities—notscience in the humanities (as in Darwinian literary theory), but science of. The distinction is important. To critics, a science of the humanities is simply unfathomable, a contradiction in terms. It weaponizes Darwinian theory, co-opts the most painstaking literary work, and bashes away close reading with a club.… ]]> Sun, 16 May 2010 16:21:00 -0700 http://www.thecommonreview.org/feature-articles/gottschalls-problem.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgjlJ5hEbw&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:45:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgjlJ5hEbw&feature=youtube_gdata