4Humanities: Designing Digital Advocacy, DH 2013

4Humanities: Designing Digital
Advocacy
DH 2013
Lindsay Thomas
Alan Liu; Geoffrey Rockwell; Stéfan Sinclair; Melissa
Terras; Jared Bielby; Victoria Smith; Mark Turcato;
Christine Henseler
Slides for this presentation available
on Slideshare
@4Hum, contact@4humanities.org, 4humanities.org

4Humanities Mission Statement
The digital humanities are increasingly integrated
in the humanities at large. They catch the eye of
administrators and funding agencies who
otherwise dismiss the humanities as yesterday‘s
news. They connect across disciplines with
science and engineering fields. They have the
potential to use new technologies to help the
humanities communicate with, and adapt
to, contemporary society.

4Humanities Local Chapters:
4Humanities@CSUN
4Humanities@McGill
4Humanities@NY6
4Humanities@UCL
4Humanities@UCSB

Surveying the Field: Arguments For and
Against the Humanities (and some in
between)

Arguments Against the Humanities:
(Taken from a report by Mark Turcato under supervision from Stéfan Sinclair, available here:
http://circa.cs.ualberta.ca/index.php/CIRCA:Arguments_AGAINST_the_Humanities)
―Half of freshly minted college graduates are unemployed or
underemployed. And they‘re saddled with a portion of the
U.S.‘s $1 trillion in student loan debt to pay record high
tuitions. To fix this problem, the answer is simple enough: cut
out the departments offering majors that make students
unemployable.... for students, lenders, and parents it makes
no sense to send a child to college to study humanities if
they do not have a chance at getting a job that uses the skills
they‘ve developed.‖
- Peter Cohan, ―To Boost Post-College Prospects, Cut
Humanities Departments,‖ Forbes, May 29, 2012)

―For some 40 years, literature professors have toyed
with the humanities in principle and practice, and
they have dismembered its prior achievements,
sometimes brilliantly but usually shortsightedly. The
game could continue as long as the money kept
coming… The budget, though, has wounded it—
fatally. The economics of the university have raised
the stakes to actual survival, making provocative and
radical positions look irresponsible.‖
- Mark Bauerlein, ―Oh, the Humanities!‖ The Weekly
Standard, May 11, 2011

―Somewhere along the way, many people in the
humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The
humanities turned from an inward to an outward
focus. They were less about the old notions of
truth, beauty and goodness and more about political
and social categories like race, class and gender.
Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when
talking about politics but more tentative about private
morality because they didn‘t want to offend anybody.‖
- David Brooks, ―The Humanist Vocation,‖ New York
Times, June 20, 2013

Arguments For the Humanities:
(Taken from a report by Jared Bielby, available here:
http://circa.cs.ualberta.ca/index.php/CIRCA:Arguments_FOR_the_Humanities)
―The opposition of ‗liberal arts‘ and ‗vocational
education‘ carries with it a lot of residual 19th-century
class snobbery as well as 20th-century quantitative
bias. In the real world of the 21st century, though,
there aren‘t ‗two cultures‘ – the arts and the
sciences. We need both.‖
- Cathy N. Davidson, ―A New Curriculum for Real-
World Success,‖ The Globe and Mail, Oct 13, 2012)

Somewhere In Between
―To the question ‗of what use are the humanities?‘, the
only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an
answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification,
after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective
outside its performance. An activity that cannot be
justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as
instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are
their own good. There is nothing more to say, and
anything that is said … diminishes the object of its
supposed praise.‖
- Stanley Fish, ―Will the Humanities Save Us?‖ New York
Times, January 6, 2008

4Humanities Projects
AllOurIdeas Poll
Humanities, Plain & Simple
#WhatEvery1One Says
Humanities Infographics

All Our Ideas poll:
allourideas.org/4humanities

Humanities, Plain & Simple:
4humanities.org/category/humanities
-plain-and-simple/

#WhatEvery1Says:
4humanities.org/2013/04/what-everyone-says-
about-the-humanities-research-project/

Humanities Infographics: 4humanities.org/category/for-
the-public/humanities-infographics/

Flickr: flickr.com/photos/ucldh/9249399742/
UCL (print-ready):ucl.ac.uk//infostudies/melissa-
terras/humanitiesmatter300.pdf

Contact for new infographics project:
Dana Solomon
@danasolomon
danasolomon@umail.ucsb.edu
Contact 4Humanities:
@4Hum
contact@4humanities.org
4humanities.org

What You Can Do
• Help us gather data for #WhatEvery1Says
Project:4humanities.org/category/whatevery1says/
• Write a ―Humanities, Plain & Simple‖ piece:
4humanities.org/category/humanities-plain-and-simple/
• Suggest statistics and information for humanities
infographics:4humanities.org/category/for-the-
public/humanities-infographics/
• Help us analyze our corpus! Email us! Tweet us!

4Humanities: Designing Digital Advocacy, DH 2013

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4Humanities: Designing Digital Advocacy, DH 2013