Instead, we just get unrelatable data.įor Julianne Van Wagenen, a fifth-year graduate student in romance languages and literatures, whose dissertation concerns the 20th-century Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio de André, literary techniques for reading texts of all kinds, including song lyrics, have the potential to cultivate greater human understanding. We lose the capacity to hear fictional, universal truth and relate it to ourselves. When we lose our storytellers we lose the capacity to relate to each other and to tell our own story. The challenge for the next generation of humanities scholars will be to synthesize the traditional questions and methods of their disciplines with the most pressing contemporary issues concerning human agency and human knowledge. Pair that with the digital humanities, where the algorithm and computational thinking is driving the profound transformation in how we access and use data, and the transformations triggered by Gutenberg seem almost obsolete. The Anthropocene (an idea borrowed from the geological sciences embodying the belief that human actions have so shaped Earth’s destiny that “the age of the humans” should be an entirely new epoch of geological time) is a driving force in the environmental humanities. These days, humanities scholars are grappling with some equally massive reconfigurations of knowledge. The rise of the human was accompanied by a series of revolutionary technologies-the printing press, moveable type, and the book, among them-that would change the way knowledge was constituted and disseminated. The humanities are not only a means for studying humanity, rather, the emergence of its disciplines announces a fundamentally new configuration of what it means to be human-capable of agency, reason, and imagination-and the historical moment when humans became the measure of knowledge. And here’s where etymology becomes intellectual history. What we call the humanities-the branch of learning concerned with human culture, including history, literature, ancient and modern languages, law, philosophy, art, and music-originates from “humane,” “human,” and “humanity,” words that signal the rise of humanist knowledge in the 15th and 16th centuries. To get to it, you’ll first have to contend with being human, quite literally. Page through The Oxford English Dictionary and you’ll discover that “humanities” doesn’t have its own entry.
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