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 re

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.