Humanities Technology and Liberal Arts

This is a bittersweet pill. On the one hand, it's encouraging that the digital humanities look to the outside for inspiration and influence—it's one example of a re-orientation of humanistic practice toward the world and its interests. But on the other hand, the rationale for that orientation is somewhat perverted; it is motivated primarily by an inward-looking reformational interest. This is why so much of the talk in digital humanities is about digital humanities. This is institution-building, not world-building.

worst case

techno-liberalism

the digital humanities becomes an organizational-political lever to advance arguments for the reformation of the humanities, but whose means of reformation is primarily self-reflexive, and whose manner of executing on that self-reflexive reformation relies largely on imported materials and methods to bulk up the ramparts that would protect humanism from the world it might otherwise enter

But the lower faculties must resist the temptation to partake of daily life only just enough to mine convenient resources into makeshift parapets

this simple, but amazing fact: almost none of this--Twitter, blogs, PDFs, eBooks, Google, Findings--would have been intelligible to a writer fifteen years ago

open up the conversation to the public whose support the traditional humanities has lost. If anyone and everyone can join in, if the invitation of open access is widely accepted, appreciation of what humanists do will grow beyond the confines of the university

social graph represents the normalisation of technology into existing patterns of behaviour. It is not so much a radical departure as a reappropriation of technology for a very basic human purpose. 

social' experience online is a peculiarly stylised one

So if 'social' is an expansion of 'Digital', and if both are in the process of assimilation into mainstream culture, then where might we be going next? The answer, I suspect might come not from technology but from the far greater context of global economic and social change. 

it is the world, and not the screen that matters. 

The challenges facing the next two generations are significant. Restore faith in the integrity of the state, adjust expectations of personal wealth and progressive growth, sustain the momentum of tolerance and integration, adjust to a career based on flux and uncertainty, find innovative, practical solutions to environmental change and the scarcity of resources. That's on top of the usual concerns of health, education, security and welfare. And somewhere in this mix they will need to begin to find answers to profoundly important questions of transparency, equality and social justice. 

It will be the connectedness of things and people, and they ways in which technology allows us to create and manipulate those connections that counts

Connected Age - in which people are connected socially, digitally, personally and politically in a kind of augmented communitarianism

Connection is what we do - showing people the global implication of their personal context, demonstrating that cultures across the world share more in common than in conflict, empowering literacy in the fullest sense - linguistic, informational and cultural - to equip this future generation with the tools both intelligently to navigate the abundance of information and to use it to achieve social justice.  

The idea of museums provides a Connected society with depth, validity and context - it makes their advance incremental rather than cyclical.

The library is a place in which people become connected and which, critically, can help overcome the increasing risk of disenfranchisement and illiteracy. The archive provides a fund of prior knowledge upon which to build future ideas.

challenges of relevance

And yet, for the most part, our writing pedagogies remain unchanged in composition classrooms

This is how we generally view computers and writing. It's one more thing to do.

And this is how we view the digital humanities as well. It's one more thing to do.

it seems rhetorically savvy to take up invitations like Jobs' as an opportunity to participate in the world. Yes, we would say, the humanities do have an important role in the development of new technologies. We do have something to say about creativity, ethics, communication, community, and such that are integral to technological design and use, theory and practice.

How would one bracket off the technologies in which one is immersed to practice a non-digital humanities?