Humanists engage with questions of value and interpretation with realms of rhetoric as well as logic, with subjective judgement along side attention to verifiable truths.
Burdick et al. One. Humanities to Digital Humanities in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 4.
This passage stood out to me because of the way it weaves together seemingly contrasting concepts and ways of thinking into one more cohesive definition. I have engaged with Humanities a lot over my time in school but never really stopped to think about what the discipline truly encompasses. Humanities classes have always just been the “not science or math” classes. This passage encouraged me to think a little more critically about this discipline I have spent so much time researching, creating and talking about. I especially like the last part of the sentence “subjective judgement along side attention to verifiable truths”. This puts words to a feature of humanities discussion and work that I find is sometimes difficult to make tangible but is always present. I would argue that it is kind of what you are going for when you propose and defend a thesis in a humanities assignment. You are using rhetoric within a logical structure to argue a specific perspective grounded in verifiable truths which is all encompassed by your subjective judgement. I am interested in seeing how this foundation of methods and thinking can be displayed using the tools and ethos of the Digital Humanities. I am most interested in learning digital tools that help display and communicate more complicated stories or knowledge that otherwise might not be shared with a greater audience, such as translating scientific findings into words and/or images that are more interesting and easy to understand for people who are not scientists and have no desire to be scientists. I am excited to learn these new tools and apply them to other areas of knowledge.
