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On potential development strategies for Digital Humanities
https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2021-4-70-94
Abstract
The Humanities are marginalised in today’s ranking of scholarly disciplines. This is partially due to their poorly monetisable subject matter, as well as the fact that their methodology is firmly rooted in the industrial era. The digital revolution provided the humanities with new technologies. However, the same newly available statistical methods that enable generalisation of a large bulk of materials and management of accurate data are fraught with serious limitations. Despite their ostensible novelty, the new methods cannot solve the epistemological problems of humanist learning; instead, they merely help its further adaptation to the inductive logic of scientific positivism, typical of the industrial era. This means that, given their digital nature (i. e., association with the digital era), they fail to generate a new ontology for the humanities. The value of new technologies is mainly determined by our ability to use them in an unconventional way. In order to preserve the subject matter of the humanities in its entirety, one should learn about the potential as well as limitations of digital methods and devise a positive strategy of their application.
About the Author
G. N. Belyak
Institute of Russian Literature (The Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Gavriil N. Belyak, literary critic
4 Makarov Emb., St. Petersburg, 199034
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Review
For citations:
Belyak G.N. On potential development strategies for Digital Humanities. Voprosy literatury. 2021;(4):70-94. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2021-4-70-94
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