As an engineering student, the humanities have never been something that I’ve given much thought to apart from the obligatory credit hours I had to fill. To me the open ended qualitative analysis that the humanities seemed to emphasize was something I could not understand, and therefore was of no interest to me.
The lack of real, tangible products also made it difficult to understand what the purpose of the field was as well. You could certainly say that I am a “humanities deaf” individual, and I would have no argument.
What is exciting about the digital humanities field is that most of these issues no longer apply. As computing is introduced and used to do the previously qualitative analyses that I did not understand, things become more clear. In order to create these digital tools, the rules of analysis must be clearly defined and become much less open ended. This is a major advancement in reaching the humanities deaf like me, as instead of scratching my head trying to figure out how somebody came up with their analysis I can see exactly what they told the computer to do. Another change is that instead of producing just books and articles on their findings, digital humanities professionals are creating tools that allow someone like me to perform my own analysis.
The downside of this is the potential to dumb down the humanities. To take subjectivity out of the humanities would be to remove the point entirely. The humanities is about exploring the depths of human feeling and expression, and a computer cannot be taught to measure this accurately no matter how well programmed. In all, I find the field somewhat exciting in its ability to make the humanities easier to understand and explore for more people. This will be a good thing as long as it does not take away the deep exploration of human feeling that makes the humanities important to our world.
I think you bring up a really interesting point that I had not considered much before. Coming from a mindset where critical and qualitative analysis are fundmental cornerstones of the way I think and act, I find it somewhat tedious and overly simple to break humanities such as writing into numbers and counters and patterns. Like you said, it feels in many ways like you are trying to dumb them down to make them easier to comprehend, which takes away a lot of the meaning. But for someone like you, who has no real investment in the qualitative measurements, such statistical breakdown of these very complex artifacts allows you to view them in a different light. It helps you process them easier than you could before. I like that you brought this up because it really allowed me to alter some of my views on the field by sharing a different perspective!
I think it’s interesting you find it does the qualitative work.
From the skimming experience we’ve had in class, it feels more quantitative to me (though I’m also more used to having to do more qualitative looks at things, partly due to the classes I’ve taken since HS).
You’ve all made fascinating points here. It’s an interesting question to try to separate the mode of analysis (quantitative or qualitative, to use the words you’ve been using), from the kinds of questions that are asked. Can quantitative modes of analysis tell us something about human feeling and expression? Can qualitative analysis tell us about facts? It’s a question we’ll be returning to throughout the course, and I hope you’ll have an answer by the time we’re through!