English Department "CRC" Collaborative Research Center
|
CRC Seminar table area with TV Screen. Note: we'll have more chairs around the table for the coffee hour.
|
CRC - larger view of the open-plan room. |
(co-presenters: Alan Liu and Alec Killoran)
(co-presenters: Alan Liu and Jeremy Douglass)
Topic model of discourse related to “humanities” in New York Times, 2010-2014 (1,087 items):
4Humanities@UCSB will hold its initial meeting of the 2014-15 academic year on Monday, November 3, 3-4:30 pm, in South Hall 2509. Continuing and new participants are invited. A surprise, high-visibility new 4Humanities project will be announced at this meeting.
Now in its fourth year, 4Humanities@UCSB is the UCSB chapter of the international initiative (founded at UCSB) named "4Humanities: Advocating for the Humanities" (http://4humanities.org/). The international initiative includes scholars, students, and others working on advocacy for the humanities. The initiative is supported by the international digital humanities community on the premise that digital new media today have a special role to play in effective humanities advocacy.
As an IHC Research Focus Group on our campus, 4Humanities@UCSB meets during the year around a few topics and readings. Beyond being a discussion forum, however, 4Humanities@UCSB is also a production shop. Ongoing concrete projects underway based at UCSB include the WhatEvery1Says project to analyze public discourse about the humanities using data-mining methods. 4Humanities@UCSB also holds some joint meetings and workshops with other Southern California chapters of 4Humanities at California State U., Northridge (4Hum@CSUN) and at UCLA (4Hum#UCLA).
Contact Info: 4Humanities@UCSB faculty leaders: Alan Liu (ayliu@english.ucsb.edu) and Linda Adler-Kassner (adler-kassner@writing.ucsb.edu). 4Humanities Lead Research Assistant: Ashley Champagne (ashleychampagne@gmail.com).
By Floris Solleveld
The history of the humanities considered as a whole is still a young discipline. While there are well over a hundred institutes and graduate schools in the history of science, or the history and philosophy of science, for example, there is nothing comparable for the humanities. Equally rare are compound histories of the "sciences and humanities." In the case of the humanities, the typical pattern has been for the history of each discipline to be written separately by practitioners in that discipline – e.g., the history of linguistics by linguists, the history of philology by philologists, and the history of historiography by historians. As a consequence, the strong interrelations that have existed historically between different branches of the humanities (and between the humanities and the sciences) have been hidden from view, along with the fact that earlier in history these disciplines did not exist as such.
Recently this situation has begun to change. Partly this is due to the rise of digital humanities scholarship, which operates throughout these different disciplines and is now also being applied to their history; partly it is due to a shift from focusing on the history of disciplines, key figures, and core ideas to focusing instead on scholarly practices, information networks and epistemic virtues. But a key factor is one particular series of international events: the "Making of the Humanities" conferences.
Started in 2008, these biannual conferences have drawn an audience of historians, philologists, philosophers, and other scholars active in the history of the humanities primarily from all over Europe. They have now resulted in an ongoing series of published essay collections: Volume I (2010) on the early modern humanities; Volume II (2012) on the transition in the humanities from early modern scholarship to modern disciplines around 1800; and Volume III (forthcoming 2015) on the further institutionalization and professionalization of the humanities after 1850.
The "Making of the Humanities" conferences are also the impetus behind the recent monograph Rens Bod, one of the event organizers and a professor of computational and digital humanities at the University of Amsterdam: A New History of the Humanities (English translation 2013, Oxford UP). (Bod was recently the featured participant in a 4Humanities forum on "Global Humanities.") Though not technically speaking the first history of the human sciences at large -- that is George Gusdorf's today largely unknown 13-volume Les Sciences Humaines et la Pensée Occidentale (1966-88) -- Bod's book is the first to present the history of the humanities in a global perspective. Challenging the traditional self-perception of the humanities as broadly characterized by an "hermeneutic" approach, Bod presents an analysis of the heuristic principles applied, and patterns identified in, the different fields of the humanities throughout their history.
Unlike the previous "Making of the Humanities" conferences, the fourth in the series, "Making of the Humanities IV" (or MotH IV) is not devoted to a specific period. Instead, it will focus on the theme of "Connecting Disciplines" to provide a forum for comparing methods and patterns across disciplines. MotH IV will take place at the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome, 16-18 October 2014; the call for papers (abstracts and panel proposals) expires 1 June.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.