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idk man, I'm a humanities major whose spent all of my career, which spans about a decade and a half now, around people who have had very little to no exposure t

idk man, I'm a humanities major whose spent all of my career, which spans about a decade and a half now, around people who have had very little to no exposure to humanities courses and my take is that more people need to take them. The quality of analysis and opinion outside of academia is just, I'll be blunt, incredibly poor. I think claiming that literary analysis courses are just a bunch of people spouting opinions is an unfair reduction. You learn analytical techniques, you learn how to identify theme and structure, how to perform a historical analysis versus a contemporary reading, close reading, logical analysis etc etc. There's not just depth at the level of an individual work, there's tons of technical and analytical and procedural depth to uncover in the practice of interpretation. Inadequacies in this practice lead directly to bad societal outcomes imo. People who are unable to critically dissect narratives are also easy to manipulate. Worse, a lot of people who lack exposure to these ideas do not even ask important questions in the first place, even basic ones like, "how might this tech actually impact society" because they simply have never had the training to learn that asking these kinds of questions is important. Also I do think it is an actual research field, which, just like any other field, changes as available tech changes. For example digital humanities is a relatively new approach that was mostly enabled by the advent of statistics and computers. This unlocked a whole new suite of literary analysis techniques and perspectives, and these new techniques have actually furnished novel interpretations and second looks at previous works (a really concrete example, these techniques have been used to resolve questions of disputed or unclear authorship) just like technological innovations do the same in other sciences and research fields.

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anal_reactor 1y ago
This is a symptom of a much deeper issue. The education system is completely broken because quite often if the student memorizes answers, that's already huge success. There is very little attention towards teaching students new ways of thinking. Not to mention that even in prestigious schools, teachers are often dropouts who failed to secure a more lucrative career in private sector, which means they themselves aren't competent. And even besides this, many people have too much shit going on in their lives to dedicate attention to education.
- genghisjahn 1y ago
  “Teachers are often drop outs…” do you have a source for this? I looked and didn’t find one.
BrenBarn 1y ago
I don't disagree with all that you said about analytical techniques and so on, but those are learning "how" not learning "what". It's not about learning the result of someone else's analysis, it's about learning to do the analysis. No doubt you'll need to study other people's analyses to see how they did them, but the point is not to learn their result but their process. This is reversed from something like learning physics where you are primarily learning the results of other people's discoveries (e.g., Newton) and understanding their process is secondary. > For example digital humanities is a relatively new approach that was mostly enabled by the advent of statistics and computers. This unlocked a whole new suite of literary analysis techniques and perspectives, and these new techniques have actually furnished novel interpretations and second looks at previous works (a really concrete example, these techniques have been used to resolve questions of disputed or unclear authorship) just like technological innovations do the same in other sciences and research fields. I'd say that concrete stuff like resolving authorship questions is not really the lion's share of digital humanities. And the key thing there is that there was an answer that was found. The mere fact that the field changes because of new techniques and "novel interpretations" doesn't get us very far. The question is whether such changes are an advance over previous research or simply a change. In scientific fields if a new theory is accepted it means the old theory is either enlarged or discarded; we either decide "we knew X was true, and now we know Y is also true" or we decide "we knew X was true but now we know it is false and actually Y is true". But "new interpretations" can just mean something like "some people think X and now some other people think Y", but without reference to any ground truth this doesn't represent forward progress. I'll add that I agree that humanities courses are valuable and that society would benefit from more people taking them. I just don't think that focusing on the aspects of humanities that are slightly more scientific is a good way to justify that. Insofar as something like resolving authorships questions is concrete and measurable, it's because it's using scientific methodology. The humanities cannot beat science at its own game. I see the humanities as more valuable in how they provide a broader context and motivation for scientific and technical work. I don't think this is incompatible with what you said, it's just a matter of what gets the emphasis.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  I see the humanities (I mean literature here and not so much history etc) as a continuation of cautionary tales and parables and fables and legends and fairy tales around the campfire. Its "output" is that you're better able to feel on a visceral level how others might feel or what the social outcome can be, or what the deep values of your society are etc. Literary analysis is twice removed from this. Ground level is how you act in a new situation. Once removed is the concrete stories you hear at the campfire. Twice removed is the dissecting analysis of the story and more meta levels. In physics the ground level is solving a new engineering problem in industry. You use the recipes and methods you learned in physics class to formulate your problem in the language of physics and solve it. Once removed is teaching the equations and methods themselves. Twice removed is discussing how the physics knowledge was produced historically and how research is done today. I do belive though that learning about the history of science is immensely enlightening. In school it seems like these things just fell from the sky fully formed like Athene from Zeus' forehead. Kuhn's book on the Copernican revolution is super interesting. I found it better than the more famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The latter is more abstract and tries to build a big theory, while the former mostly just narrates how it happened in the concrete case of Copernicus, Kepler et al.

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anal_reactor 1y ago

This is a symptom of a much deeper issue. The education system is completely broken because quite often if the student memorizes answers, that's already huge success. There is very little attention towards teaching students new ways of thinking. Not to mention that even in prestigious schools, teachers are often dropouts who failed to secure a more lucrative career in private sector, which means they themselves aren't competent. And even besides this, many people have too much shit going on in their lives to dedicate attention to education.

genghisjahn 1y ago
“Teachers are often drop outs…” do you have a source for this? I looked and didn’t find one.

BrenBarn 1y ago

I don't disagree with all that you said about analytical techniques and so on, but those are learning "how" not learning "what". It's not about learning the result of someone else's analysis, it's about learning to do the analysis. No doubt you'll need to study other people's analyses to see how they did them, but the point is not to learn their result but their process. This is reversed from something like learning physics where you are primarily learning the results of other people's discoveries (e.g., Newton) and understanding their process is secondary. > For example digital humanities is a relatively new approach that was mostly enabled by the advent of statistics and computers. This unlocked a whole new suite of literary analysis techniques and perspectives, and these new techniques have actually furnished novel interpretations and second looks at previous works (a really concrete example, these techniques have been used to resolve questions of disputed or unclear authorship) just like technological innovations do the same in other sciences and research fields. I'd say that concrete stuff like resolving authorship questions is not really the lion's share of digital humanities. And the key thing there is that there was an answer that was found. The mere fact that the field changes because of new techniques and "novel interpretations" doesn't get us very far. The question is whether such changes are an advance over previous research or simply a change. In scientific fields if a new theory is accepted it means the old theory is either enlarged or discarded; we either decide "we knew X was true, and now we know Y is also true" or we decide "we knew X was true but now we know it is false and actually Y is true". But "new interpretations" can just mean something like "some people think X and now some other people think Y", but without reference to any ground truth this doesn't represent forward progress. I'll add that I agree that humanities courses are valuable and that society would benefit from more people taking them. I just don't think that focusing on the aspects of humanities that are slightly more scientific is a good way to justify that. Insofar as something like resolving authorships questions is concrete and measurable, it's because it's using scientific methodology. The humanities cannot beat science at its own game. I see the humanities as more valuable in how they provide a broader context and motivation for scientific and technical work. I don't think this is incompatible with what you said, it's just a matter of what gets the emphasis.

bonoboTP 1y ago
I see the humanities (I mean literature here and not so much history etc) as a continuation of cautionary tales and parables and fables and legends and fairy tales around the campfire. Its "output" is that you're better able to feel on a visceral level how others might feel or what the social outcome can be, or what the deep values of your society are etc. Literary analysis is twice removed from this. Ground level is how you act in a new situation. Once removed is the concrete stories you hear at the campfire. Twice removed is the dissecting analysis of the story and more meta levels. In physics the ground level is solving a new engineering problem in industry. You use the recipes and methods you learned in physics class to formulate your problem in the language of physics and solve it. Once removed is teaching the equations and methods themselves. Twice removed is discussing how the physics knowledge was produced historically and how research is done today. I do belive though that learning about the history of science is immensely enlightening. In school it seems like these things just fell from the sky fully formed like Athene from Zeus' forehead. Kuhn's book on the Copernican revolution is super interesting. I found it better than the more famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The latter is more abstract and tries to build a big theory, while the former mostly just narrates how it happened in the concrete case of Copernicus, Kepler et al.