Event Title

Humanistic Challenges in Technology courses and vice versa: putting together a syllabus for a multi-disciplinary class

Presenter Information

Eleni Bozia

Location

CB1-301

Start Date

4-11-2017 3:15 PM

End Date

4-11-2017 4:15 PM

Description

The advancement of Digital Humanities and the increasing number of academics and enthusiasts have turned the focus to the following issues:

1. Why do the Humanities need technology, and how technology can be used to effectuate advanced research that has not been possible thus far?
2. How to motivate technology savvy individuals to collaborate with humanists.

In this discussion, I intend to broaden the perspective and set the question: how do the Humanities can and should use technology, and how do technologically related areas can and should use the Humanities?

Two years ago I designed a class titled "Digital Tools for the Arts and Humanities," which I offer to a large gamut of students, ranging from Digital Arts and Sciences and Computer Science to Classics, English, Linguistics, Architecture, and Anthropology. The point of the class is to introduce each field to the other, explore Humanities and technology, and study their confluences.

The challenges that have presented themselves and that I would like to bring forward and consider in this roundtable discussion have to do with the exigency to (re) present the Humanities not only to scientists, but to the humanists as well. First, Humanities are not just the study of the human record, as several scientists contend. The fields of study that constitute the Humanities provide individuals with the ability to think and communicate with one another. Social media rely on the Humanities, and other media of communication— online reviews, blogs, game reviews etc.—need to resort to the fundamental attribute of the Humanities, namely language. On the other hand, human languages are the seminal constructional parameter for programming languages. Therefore, humanists need to come to terms with newly molded forms of expression and enhance their research and understanding of their own fields, and computer scientists need to realize the fundamentally pervasive nature of the Humanities that infiltrates basic parameters of programming, while it also represents the human factor, which computer science is meant to serve, for instance in the form of human-centric computing.

The second half of the class is dedicated to several tools, such as html, xml, stylometric analysis, and visualization. Once more the issue that arises is not familiarization with the above, but the consideration of how these tools can be put to use in various fields as well as how students with different backgrounds can work together to create innovative projects.

The issue that I intend to discuss is how we can persuade not only humanists about the exigency of technology, but also programmers about the humanistic factor behind their work. Ultimately, the point is that the human factor should be both the drive and the purpose of every field of study and inquiry. It is only then that one can embrace the significance in the diversity of knowledge and appreciate the uniqueness in each individual field as well as the exigency to set them all in a collaborative motion.