Humanities Scholars Embrace Digital Technology

Posted on November 21, 2010

The New York Times reports on an interesting trend in the study of the humanities: focusing on how the digital age is changing our understanding of many subjects in the liberal arts. This group of scholars uses technology to change how they interpret and understand liberal arts. The Times reports:

These researchers are digitally mapping Civil War battlefields to understand what role topography played in victory, using databases of thousands of jam sessions to track how musical collaborations influenced jazz, searching through large numbers of scientific texts and books to track where concepts first appeared and how they spread, and combining animation, charts and primary documents about Thomas Jefferson's travels to create new ways to teach history.

But not everyone is a fan. Princeton historian Anthony Grafton told the Times that although the digital humanities do great things in quantification, that the key to humanistic scholarship is about interpretation. That, at least so far, still must be done by humans.