“We refuse to take the default position that the humanities are in ‘crisis,’ in part because this very rhetoric of crisis has persisted for well over a century, however many mutations it has undergone. Jeremiads regarding the decline of educational standards, the failure of students and faculty alike to adequately embrace humanistic ideals, and the demise of tradition may well be inherent to the process of education itself. Digital_Humanities adopts a different view: It envisages the present era as one of exceptional promise for the renewal of humanistic scholarship”
Burdick et al. “One: Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 7.
Upon reading this selection by Burdock et al., my curiosity was piqued, my hopes were roused, and my respect for the authors began to be garnered. I feel that everywhere I have looked over the past few years, interest (and faith) in the humanities has been steadily decreasing. To see some folks so conscious of digital development take such a certain and optimistic stance on the universal essentiality of the humanities was, for me, somewhere in between a cool drink of water in the middle of the Sahara and a breath of fresh air on Mars. Even more reassuring is the fact that the basis of this argument does not rely (as many do) solely on some pathological (albeit well-meaning and spirited), dogmatic and anthropocentric notion of the humanities being important due to the fact that they are simply more “human” (in this case really meaning more familiar and easier to reassuringly see oneself in than the hard sciences) than some other courses of study, a (false) belief which rests on the assumption that what is especially human is inherently good. Burdock et al. refreshingly transcend this fallacy through the understanding that “the humanities must survive because they embody distinctive modes of producing knowledge and distinctive models of knowledge itself” (7). If the humanities are, in summation, humankind’s pursuit of self-knowledge, then they may never truly fade in relevance; truth is eternal, and so is its pursuit by flawed creatures. The humanities may never decrease in importance; humans, however, can grow in their ignorance.
A major contribution to my appreciation for the thoughts illustrated in the above quotations was perhaps a major and tumultuous era of change which I experienced last winter. I had been previously considering majoring in, and assumedly pursuing a career in, geology. I held this idea for several reasons. Firstly, I like being outdoors. Secondly I thought the humanities were doomed. Thankfully, I fell into a vigorous and exhilarating period of self-examination that quickly rendered these assumptions null and silly. For all along what really roused me was the pursuit of truth within the psyche (which stems from the Greek ψύχη or soul), which in turn makes me a lover of everything beautiful humanity has produced, as we are all lovers of truth whether we have remembered or not. I had been dissuading myself from this path on false and pedantic grounds, but I thankfully escaped from this ignorance. So, I suppose I enjoyed this excerpt in particular because, like one’s reflection in the window of another’s bright room, I saw myself in it.
As for the broader dimensions of Digital Humanities, the method I am most excited to become further acquainted with is 3D modeling. I have thoroughly enjoyed using Autodesk so far, and I think digitally rendering humanistic objects, spaces and beyond sounds like an excellent way to make them more accessible for anyone who wishes to engage with them. However, I do worry that by digitizing things, and leading more people to engage deeply with and become engrossed in these images, we are drawing ourselves deeper into illusion and away from that which is truly real. As humans, we are all prone, and often eager, to mistake appearances for reality, and we should all keep our wits about us when engaging with that which is digital, lest we lose our humanism for the sake of digitally advancing its study. We all may gawk at the plight of they who have fallen in love with a chatbot, but we are not so different from (nor any safer than) them. For, who among us does not chase shadows?