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Gottschall believes that these problems (the humanities’ increasing irrelevance, decreasing popularity, and the subjects' inability to ever answer questions con
by mathattack 13y ago
Gottschall believes that these problems (the humanities’ increasing irrelevance, decreasing popularity, and the subjects' inability to ever answer questions conclusively) are not only connected, but can be solved by implementing the kind of data mining tools and computational textual analysis carried out by the likes of Patrick Juola.
I can't see this saving the humanities. I see it further burying the humanities. The humanities live by asking deep fundamental questions about, well, being human. Being upstaged by a computer hurts them more than helps.
I'm a big believer in the power of algos like the ones discussed. I'm also a big believer that humanities are one of the few fields that can retain value in a post-MOOC world. (You can learn accounting and programming online. Small group discussions are best for Shakespeare.) But I think that algorithms in literature will hurt the field.
- Houshalter 13y agoOne can have a discussion online. In person might be preferable but it's a pretty good alternative. I don't know much about the field but it doesn't seem like algorithmic analysis would be terribly useful. But there are some really interesting things that can be done. And enough with the "computers vs humans thing". It's just a tool that helps analyze doing things that would be extremely time consuming for a human, like counting words, or looking for statistical patterns, or whatever.