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I've been encountering a lot of deep humanities types lately who nevertheless are not mathematically incompetent, have math knowledge up to (say) first-year and
by davidgerard 10y ago
I've been encountering a lot of deep humanities types lately who nevertheless are not mathematically incompetent, have math knowledge up to (say) first-year and can code competent small-script Python just fine thank you. And frankly, we need more of this. The STEM/humanities divide is artificial, and any competent intelligent person needs to be able to sling both to at least a basic level.
- schoen 10y agoIt's kind of a big field by now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities One of the earliest triumphs (from the scholarly point of view, although it's also super-scary for privacy) is the success of stylometry for authorship attribution of unknown books, letters, and manuscripts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry I had a high school teacher who (as an English grad student) used a concordance to make an argument about Mark Twain's vocabulary, showing either when a particular work was likely written or when Twain likely read some other work (I forgot which). But that kind of thing and even more impressive inferences would be pretty routine today using computer tools.
- davidgerard 10y agoYeah, this stuff is marvellous. These days it's not even "digital humanities", it's really just "humanities". All this human interaction stuff we do is what humanities people are there to understand, whether digital or not, and that too requires some understanding of the machine.